Deep Ordinal Regression for Pledge Specificity Prediction

Shivashankar Subramanian, Trevor Cohn, Timothy Baldwin

Abstract
Many pledges are made in the course of an election campaign, forming important corpora for political analysis of campaign strategy and governmental accountability. At present, there are no publicly available annotated datasets of pledges, and most political analyses rely on manual annotations. In this paper we collate a novel dataset of manifestos from eleven Australian federal election cycles, with over 12,000 sentences annotated with specificity (e.g., rhetorical vs detailed pledge) on a fine-grained scale. We propose deep ordinal regression approaches for specificity prediction, under both supervised and semi-supervised settings, and provide empirical results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed techniques over several baseline approaches. We analyze the utility of pledge specificity modeling across a spectrum of policy issues in performing ideology prediction, and further provide qualitative analysis in terms of capturing party-specific issue salience across election cycles.
Anthology ID:
D19-1182
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1729–1740
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1182
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1182
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shivashankar Subramanian, Trevor Cohn, and Timothy Baldwin. 2019. Deep Ordinal Regression for Pledge Specificity Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1729–1740, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Deep Ordinal Regression for Pledge Specificity Prediction (Subramanian et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D19-1182.pdf
Code
 shivashankarrs/Pledge-Specificity
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