Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates

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Repository description

This repository contains the code for our EACL 2023 Findings paper for predicting mentions of the people and the elite in political text.

The code can be used to replicate the results from our paper:

Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates

@inproceedings{klamm-etal-2023-kind,
    title = "Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates",
    author = "Klamm, Christopher  and
      Rehbein, Ines  and
      Ponzetto, Simone Paolo",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.91",
    pages = "1227--1243"
}

Content of this repository:

- mope_baseline_system
      - models/ORL-1 (the 3 MoPE models)
      - src (the source code)
        - mope_train.py
        - mope_predict.py
        - tagger.py
        - helpers.py
        - evaluation.py
      - config (the config files)  
      - models
        - BERT-MOPE-L3
          - run[1-3]
      - results
        - (folder for system predictions and results)
      - data (the labelled train/dev/test data for each annotation level)

- mope_tri_system 
      - models/ORL-1 (the 3 MoPE models)
      - src (the source code)
        - mope_train.py
        - mope_predict.py
        - tagger.py
        - helpers.py
        - evaluation.py
      - config (the config files)  
      - models
      - data (the labelled train/dev/test data for each annotation level)

    - README.md (this readme file)
    - docs
        - MoPE_paper_EACL_findings_2023.pdf 
        - MoPE-Annotation_Guidelines_English.pdf
        - MoPE-Datasheet.pdf

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Running the baseline model (folder: mope_baseline)

Download the model directories for the baseline models:

• model1, model2, model3

and put them in the folders run1, run2 and run3 under mope_baseline/models/BERT-MOPE-L3/

Decompress the three model folders:

• tar -xzf bert-base-german-cased-finetuned-MOPE-L3_Run_1_Epochs_43.tgz
• tar -xzf ...

You can use the following script to get the predictions for the test set from each of the three models (also see config file):

run 1 - 3:

python src/mope_predict_l3.py config/pred_l3.conf 

The system output is written to folder .

You can evaluate the predictions by running:

python eval_predictions.py logfile_ORL_BERT_run_1.log 

python eval_predictions.py logfile_ORL_BERT_run_2.log 

python eval_predictions.py logfile_ORL_BERT_run_3.log 

Training a new baseline model

You can train a new model on the training data and evaluate it on the test set, using this script:

python src/mope_train.py config/train_l3.conf 

If you want to change the model parameters or input/output path, you need to change the config file in the config folder.

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Running the tri-training model (folder: mope_tri)

Download the model directories for the tri-training models:

• model1, model2, model3

and put them in the folders run1, run2 and run3 under mope_tri/models/mBERT-TRI-L3/

Decompress the three model folders:

• tar -xzf mBERT-finetuned-TRI-L3_Run_1_Epochs_5_39.tgz
• tar -xzf ...

You can use the following script to get the predictions for the test set (also see the config file):

python src/mope_predict_l3.py config/pred_l3.conf predfile.txt

predfile contains the predictions for each of the individual models and the predictions for the majority vote.

You can evaluate the results, using the eval.py script:

python eval.py predfile.txt

(Please note that the results for the models are slightly different from the ones in the paper, as we decided to publish models with a slightly higher precision, at the cost of recall. F1 for both are nearly the same, with 72.5% F1 on the English test set (paper) and 72.7% F1 (the models uploaded here).

Training a new tri-training model

You can train a new model on the training data and evaluate it on the test set, using this script:

python src/mope_tri-training.py config/train-mbert-l3.conf predictions.txt

The predictions for each model are written to "predictions.txt". You can evaluate the results, using the eval.py script:

python eval.py predictions.txt

The script outputs results for each model and results for the majority vote from the three classifiers.

If you want to change the model parameters or input/output path, you need to change the config file in the config folder.
The model also requires unlabelled data for tri-training (set the path to the unlabelled data in the config file). In the paper, we sampled 20,000 sentences from the English Europarl-UdS data (see reference below).

@inproceedings{Karakanta2018b,
    title = {{EuroParl-UdS: P}reserving and Extending Metadata in Parliamentary Debates},
    author = {Alina Karakanta and Mihaela Vela and Elke Teich},
    url = {http://lrec-conf.org/workshops/lrec2018/W2/pdf/10_W2.pdf},
    year = {2018},
    date = {2018},
    booktitle = {ParlaCLARIN workshop, 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2018)},
    address = {Miyazaki, Japan},
    pubstate = {published},
}