Christopher Klamm


2023

pdf
Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates
Christopher Klamm | Ines Rehbein | Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

This paper investigates the identification of populist rhetoric in text and presents a novel cross-lingual dataset for this task. Our work is based on the definition of populism as a “communication style of political actors that refers to the people” but also includes anti-elitism as another core feature of populism. Accordingly, we annotate references to The People and The Elite in German and English parliamentary debates with a hierarchical scheme. The paper describes our dataset and annotation procedure and reports inter-annotator agreement for this task. Next, we compare and evaluate different transformer-based model architectures on a German dataset and report results for zero-shot learning on a smaller English dataset. We then show that semi-supervised tri-training can improve results in the cross-lingual setting. Our dataset can be used to investigate how political actors talk about The Elite and The People and to study how populist rhetoric is used as a strategic device.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences
Christopher Klamm | Gabriella Lapesa | Valentin Gold | Theresa Gessler | Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences

pdf
Multilabel Legal Element Classification on German Parliamentary Debates in a Low-Ressource Setting
Martin Hock | Christopher Klamm
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences

2022

pdf
FrameASt: A Framework for Second-level Agenda Setting in Parliamentary Debates through the Lense of Comparative Agenda Topics
Christopher Klamm | Ines Rehbein | Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents a framework for studying second-level political agenda setting in parliamentary debates, based on the selection of policy topics used by political actors to discuss a specific issue on the parliamentary agenda. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic as an agenda item can be contextualised as a health issue or as a civil rights issue, as a matter of macroeconomics or can be discussed in the context of social welfare. Our framework allows us to observe differences regarding how different parties discuss the same agenda item by emphasizing different topical aspects of the item. We apply and evaluate our framework on data from the German Bundestag and discuss the merits and limitations of our approach. In addition, we present a new annotated data set of parliamentary debates, following the coding schema of policy topics developed in the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), and release models for topic classification in parliamentary debates.

2017

pdf bib
Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games
Ivan Habernal | Raffael Hannemann | Christian Pollak | Christopher Klamm | Patrick Pauli | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

An important skill in critical thinking and argumentation is the ability to spot and recognize fallacies. Fallacious arguments, omnipresent in argumentative discourse, can be deceptive, manipulative, or simply leading to ‘wrong moves’ in a discussion. Despite their importance, argumentation scholars and NLP researchers with focus on argumentation quality have not yet investigated fallacies empirically. The nonexistence of resources dealing with fallacious argumentation calls for scalable approaches to data acquisition and annotation, for which the serious games methodology offers an appealing, yet unexplored, alternative. We present Argotario, a serious game that deals with fallacies in everyday argumentation. Argotario is a multilingual, open-source, platform-independent application with strong educational aspects, accessible at www.argotario.net.