Rhetorical Strategies in the UN Security Council: Rhetorical Structure Theory and Conflicts

Karolina Zaczynska, Manfred Stede


Abstract
More and more corpora are being annotated with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees, often in a multi-layer scenario, as analyzing RST annotations in combination with other layers can lead to a deeper understanding of texts. To date, prior work on RST for the analysis of diplomatic language however, is scarce. We are interested in political speeches and investigate what rhetorical strategies diplomats use to communicate critique or deal with disputes. To this end, we present a new dataset with RST annotations of 82 diplomatic speeches aligned to existing Conflict annotations (UNSC-RST). We explore ways of using rhetorical trees to analyze an annotated multi-layer corpus, looking at both the relation distribution and the tree structure of speeches. In preliminary analyses we already see patterns that are characteristic for particular topics or countries.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karolina Zaczynska and Manfred Stede. 2024. Rhetorical Strategies in the UN Security Council: Rhetorical Structure Theory and Conflicts. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 15–28, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rhetorical Strategies in the UN Security Council: Rhetorical Structure Theory and Conflicts (Zaczynska & Stede, SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.2.pdf