Who’s in, who’s out? Predicting the Inclusiveness or Exclusiveness of Personal Pronouns in Parliamentary Debates

Ines Rehbein, Josef Ruppenhofer

Abstract
This paper presents a compositional annotation scheme to capture the clusivity properties of personal pronouns in context, that is their ability to construct and manage in-groups and out-groups by including/excluding the audience and/or non-speech act participants in reference to groups that also include the speaker. We apply and test our schema on pronoun instances in speeches taken from the German parliament. The speeches cover a time period from 2017-2021 and comprise manual annotations for 3,126 sentences. We achieve high inter-annotator agreement for our new schema, with a Cohen’s κ in the range of 89.7-93.2 and a percentage agreement of > 96%. Our exploratory analysis of in/exclusive pronoun use in the parliamentary setting provides some face validity for our new schema. Finally, we present baseline experiments for automatically predicting clusivity in political debates, with promising results for many referential constellations, yielding an overall 84.9% micro F1 for all pronouns.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.629
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5849–5858
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.629
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ines Rehbein and Josef Ruppenhofer. 2022. Who’s in, who’s out? Predicting the Inclusiveness or Exclusiveness of Personal Pronouns in Parliamentary Debates. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5849–5858, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Who’s in, who’s out? Predicting the Inclusiveness or Exclusiveness of Personal Pronouns in Parliamentary Debates (Rehbein & Ruppenhofer, LREC 2022)
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