GPolS: A Contextual Graph-Based Language Model for Analyzing Parliamentary Debates and Political Cohesion

Ramit Sawhney,Arnav Wadhwa,Shivam Agarwal,Rajiv Ratn Shah

doi:10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.426

Abstract

Parliamentary debates present a valuable language resource for analyzing comprehensive options in electing representatives under a functional, free society. However, the esoteric nature of political speech coupled with non-linguistic aspects such as political cohesion between party members presents a complex and underexplored task of contextual parliamentary debate analysis. We introduce GPolS, a neural model for political speech sentiment analysis jointly exploiting both semantic language representations and relations between debate transcripts, motions, and political party members. Through experiments on real-world English data and by visualizing attention, we provide a use case of GPolS as a tool for political speech analysis and polarity prediction.

Highlights

Politics is broadly defined as the set of activities associated with the governance of a country or a region
We note that Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)+Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) significantly (p < 0.05) outperforms Majority class and BoW (TF-IDF) based approaches: Support Vector Machines (SVM) and MLP
We postulate this to fine-tuning BERT to obtain rich embeddings that better capture the context within each debate transcript

Summary

Introduction

Politics is broadly defined as the set of activities associated with the governance of a country or a region. One such aspect is the conduct of parliamentary debates between political parties having ruling and opposition power These debates discuss matters affecting the future development of a nation, such as economic and societal growth, policy reforms, and budget revisions. Records of such debates act as a valuable language resource as they provide a wealth of information regarding viewpoints of political representatives over critical societal factors (Abercrombie and Batista-Navarro, 2020b), and for assessing political candidates and basing voting decisions (Utych, 2019). This esoteric and tedious nature of political debates makes their analysis complex, forming a barrier to ordinary citizen’s insights into political stances and wide-ranging consequences they entail (Edelman, 1985)

Methods

Results

Conclusion