Abstract
The paper presents a new training dataset of sentences in 7 languages, manually annotated for sentiment, which are used in a series of experiments focused on training a robust sentiment identifier for parliamentary proceedings. The paper additionally introduces the first domain-specific multilingual transformer language model for political science applications, which was additionally pre-trained on 1.72 billion words from parliamentary proceedings of 27 European parliaments. We present experiments demonstrating how the additional pre-training on parliamentary data can significantly improve the model downstream performance, in our case, sentiment identification in parliamentary proceedings. We further show that our multilingual model performs very well on languages not seen during fine-tuning, and that additional fine-tuning data from other languages significantly improves the target parliament’s results. The paper makes an important contribution to multiple disciplines inside the social sciences, and bridges them with computer science and computational linguistics. Lastly, the resulting fine-tuned language model sets up a more robust approach to sentiment analysis of political texts across languages, which allows scholars to study political sentiment from a comparative perspective using standardized tools and techniques.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.1393
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 16024–16036
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1393
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Michal Mochtak, Peter Rupnik, and Nikola Ljubešić. 2024. The ParlaSent Multilingual Training Dataset for Sentiment Identification in Parliamentary Proceedings. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 16024–16036, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- The ParlaSent Multilingual Training Dataset for Sentiment Identification in Parliamentary Proceedings (Mochtak et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2024.lrec-main.1393.pdf