Who Sides With Whom? Towards Computational Construction of Discourse Networks for Political Debates

Introduction

Understanding the structures of political debates (which actors make what claims) is essential for understanding democratic political decision-making. The vision of computational construction of such discourse networks from newspaper reports brings together political science and natural language processing.

Dataset

423 fully annotated articles from the 2015 Tageszeitung (TAZ). 179 articles contain at least one claim. In total, 982 Claims in 764 different text passages have been annotated. This includes additional information such as actor attributes (name, party membership, etc.), date and position.

Files

• codebook.pdf : used codebook (annotation guidelines for claim detection and classification)
• train/xxxxxx.JSON : used documents for training/development
• test/xxxxxxx.JSON : used documents for evaluation

Document format

Each document is encoded as JSON file.

Following attributes are used:

• claims
  • quote: annotated text snippet
  • cdate: date of claim
  • actorvalues : List of Strings for actors (persons, organizations)
  • claims: List of Strings for claim categories (codebook)
  • cpos: polarity
  • begin: character offset
  • end: character offset
• text : String : contains complete article text (for the public version the text is scrambled for copyright reasons)
• entities:
  • begin: character offset
  • end: character offset
  • category: {LOC,ORG,PER}
• sentences
  • begin : character offset
  • end : character offset
• tokens
  • begin : character offset
  • end : character offset
  • pos : Part-Of-Speech Tag

Document example

{
  "entities": [
    {
      "end": 3,
      "category": "I-ORG",
      "begin": 0
    },
    ...
    {
      "end": 535,
      "category": "I-ORG",
      "begin": 532
    }
  ],
  "sentences": [
    {
      "end": 16,
      "begin": 0
    },
      ...
    {
      "end": 551,
      "begin": 540
    }
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "quote": "Sie müssten mit der vollen Härte von Polizei und Verfassungsschutz verfolgt werden.",
      "cdate": "20151024",
      "actorvalues": [
        "30",
        "per_Yasmin Fahimi",
        "per_Generalsekretärin",
        "org_SPD"
      ],
      "claims": [
        "800",
        "811"
      ],
      "end": 444,
      "begin": 361,
      "cpos": "1"
    }
  ],
  "tokens": [
    {
      "pos": "NE",
      "end": 3,
      "begin": 0
    },
    ...
    {
      "pos": "NN",
      "end": 551,
      "begin": 540
    }
  ],
  "text": "MZM zzdgo Basvqv\n\n\nKjqirt qhlxxzg wjk \"Vvtuffkamdvvbjm\"\n\n\n\nEqdusmfv\n\n | Frj JCE helpe cpy Jxilco-Uiqlbcts pgnywuhbhhetrxubt xtx tgk gqgzoxzvll Xjpejrxldcmnrjfjlwvx. Bpzxfy ekkg qlsa dkz Infikqljscg bvhzadngy slizuhzcf Toeehklmh, patpf nmq ZIE-Feeyqvutdmyzcysry Vjnbbd Gwpnao fa Cgefilv dn Mzqedcda. Ynyg fqgdc kewo Qsfqvlhz  \"Tnmuvkzjegrm ywp Cwxvvrneaxkscu\" . Jck fndrhzv lxm akp cxixbs Rniph wjo Ypilpjd yyz Zlaflczzpbhfgimwp ahmpfklm vkdkwd. Qx Nzunbhqwxso cgim  vl dx Evtbzly pept Fklbiwlrn  bq Jzy gvk Vndrpwdycczjblatotpxxz. (yly)\n\n\n\nTantavaszyl\n\n"
}

Paper

Who Sides With Whom? Towards Computational Construction of Discourse Networks for Political Debates

S. Padó, A. Blessing, N. Blokker, E. Dayanik, S. Haunss, und J. Kuhn. Proceedings of ACL, Florence, Italy, (2019)

@inproceedings{pado19:_who_sides_with_whom,
  abstract = {Understanding the structures of political debates (which actors make
  what claims) is essential for understanding democratic political
  decision-making. The vision of computational construction of such
  \textit{discourse networks} from newspaper reports brings together
  political science and natural language processing. This paper
  presents three contributions towards this goal: (a) a requirements
  analysis, linking the task to knowledge base population;
  (b) a first release of an annotated corpus of
   claims on the topic of migration, based on German newspaper reports; (c) initial modeling results.},
  added-at = {2019-05-14T12:02:03.000+0200},
  address = {Florence, Italy},
  author = {Padó, Sebastian and Blessing, André and Blokker, Nico and Dayanik, Erenay and Haunss, Sebastian and Kuhn, Jonas},
  biburl = {https://puma.ub.uni-stuttgart.de/bibtex/2483e9bdc5e88e4c647137a437739d49a/sp},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of ACL},
  interhash = {4f32326209adb681faaf38dc6919e57f},
  intrahash = {483e9bdc5e88e4c647137a437739d49a},
  keywords = {conference imported myown},
  note = {Accepted for publication},
  timestamp = {2019-07-07T00:04:43.000+0200},
  title = {Who Sides With Whom? Towards Computational Construction of Discourse Networks for Political Debates},
  year = 2019
}