How to Do Politics with Words: Investigating Speech Acts in Parliamentary Debates

Ines Reinig, Ines Rehbein, Simone Paolo Ponzetto


Abstract
This paper presents a new perspective on framing through the lens of speech acts and investigates how politicians make use of different pragmatic speech act functions in political debates. To that end, we created a new resource of German parliamentary debates, annotated with fine-grained speech act types. Our hierarchical annotation scheme distinguishes between cooperation and conflict communication, further structured into six subtypes, such as informative, declarative or argumentative-critical speech acts, with 14 fine-grained classes at the lowest level. We present classification baselines on our new data and show that the fine-grained classes in our schema can be predicted with an avg. F1 of around 82.0%. We then use our classifier to analyse the use of speech acts in a large corpus of parliamentary debates over a time span from 2003–2023.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.727
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:
8287–8300
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.727
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ines Reinig, Ines Rehbein, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2024. How to Do Politics with Words: Investigating Speech Acts in Parliamentary Debates. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8287–8300, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
How to Do Politics with Words: Investigating Speech Acts in Parliamentary Debates (Reinig et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.727.pdf