Target Based Speech Act Classification in Political Campaign Text

Shivashankar Subramanian, Trevor Cohn, Timothy Baldwin


Abstract
We study pragmatics in political campaign text, through analysis of speech acts and the target of each utterance. We propose a new annotation schema incorporating domain-specific speech acts, such as commissive-action, and present a novel annotated corpus of media releases and speech transcripts from the 2016 Australian election cycle. We show how speech acts and target referents can be modeled as sequential classification, and evaluate several techniques, exploiting contextualized word representations, semi-supervised learning, task dependencies and speaker meta-data.
Anthology ID:
S19-1030
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Rada Mihalcea, Ekaterina Shutova, Lun-Wei Ku, Kilian Evang, Soujanya Poria
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGSEM | SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
273–282
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S19-1030
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S19-1030
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shivashankar Subramanian, Trevor Cohn, and Timothy Baldwin. 2019. Target Based Speech Act Classification in Political Campaign Text. In Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019), pages 273–282, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Target Based Speech Act Classification in Political Campaign Text (Subramanian et al., *SEM 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-bitext-workshop/S19-1030.pdf
Code
 shivashankarrs/Speech-Acts