Come hither or go away? Recognising pre-electoral coalition signals in the news

Ines Rehbein, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Anna Adendorf, Oke Bahnsen, Lukas Stoetzer, Heiner Stuckenschmidt


Abstract
In this paper, we introduce the task of political coalition signal prediction from text, that is, the task of recognizing from the news coverage leading up to an election the (un)willingness of political parties to form a government coalition. We decompose our problem into two related, but distinct tasks: (i) predicting whether a reported statement from a politician or a journalist refers to a potential coalition and (ii) predicting the polarity of the signal – namely, whether the speaker is in favour of or against the coalition. For this, we explore the benefits of multi-task learning and investigate which setup and task formulation is best suited for each sub-task. We evaluate our approach, based on hand-coded newspaper articles, covering elections in three countries (Ireland, Germany, Austria) and two languages (English, German). Our results show that the multi-task learning approach can further improve results over a strong monolingual transfer learning baseline.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.615
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7798–7810
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.615
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.615
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ines Rehbein, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Anna Adendorf, Oke Bahnsen, Lukas Stoetzer, and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. 2021. Come hither or go away? Recognising pre-electoral coalition signals in the news. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7798–7810, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Come hither or go away? Recognising pre-electoral coalition signals in the news (Rehbein et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.615.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.615.mp4