ParlVote: A Corpus for Sentiment Analysis of Political Debates

Gavin Abercrombie, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
Debate transcripts from the UK Parliament contain information about the positions taken by politicians towards important topics, but are difficult for people to process manually. While sentiment analysis of debate speeches could facilitate understanding of the speakers’ stated opinions, datasets currently available for this task are small when compared to the benchmark corpora in other domains. We present ParlVote, a new, larger corpus of parliamentary debate speeches for use in the evaluation of sentiment analysis systems for the political domain. We also perform a number of initial experiments on this dataset, testing a variety of approaches to the classification of sentiment polarity in debate speeches. These include a linear classifier as well as a neural network trained using a transformer word embedding model (BERT), and fine-tuned on the parliamentary speeches. We find that in many scenarios, a linear classifier trained on a bag-of-words text representation achieves the best results. However, with the largest dataset, the transformer-based model combined with a neural classifier provides the best performance. We suggest that further experimentation with classification models and observations of the debate content and structure are required, and that there remains much room for improvement in parliamentary sentiment analysis.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.624
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
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, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5073–5078
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.624
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gavin Abercrombie and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2020. ParlVote: A Corpus for Sentiment Analysis of Political Debates. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5073–5078, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
ParlVote: A Corpus for Sentiment Analysis of Political Debates (Abercrombie & Batista-Navarro, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.624.pdf