Policy Preference Detection in Parliamentary Debate Motions

Gavin Abercrombie, Federico Nanni, Riza Batista-Navarro, Simone Paolo Ponzetto


Abstract
Debate motions (proposals) tabled in the UK Parliament contain information about the stated policy preferences of the Members of Parliament who propose them, and are key to the analysis of all subsequent speeches given in response to them. We attempt to automatically label debate motions with codes from a pre-existing coding scheme developed by political scientists for the annotation and analysis of political parties’ manifestos. We develop annotation guidelines for the task of applying these codes to debate motions at two levels of granularity and produce a dataset of manually labelled examples. We evaluate the annotation process and the reliability and utility of the labelling scheme, finding that inter-annotator agreement is comparable with that of other studies conducted on manifesto data. Moreover, we test a variety of ways of automatically labelling motions with the codes, ranging from similarity matching to neural classification methods, and evaluate them against the gold standard labels. From these experiments, we note that established supervised baselines are not always able to improve over simple lexical heuristics. At the same time, we detect a clear and evident benefit when employing BERT, a state-of-the-art deep language representation model, even in classification scenarios with over 30 different labels and limited amounts of training data.
Anthology ID:
K19-1024
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
249–259
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1024
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1024
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gavin Abercrombie, Federico Nanni, Riza Batista-Navarro, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2019. Policy Preference Detection in Parliamentary Debate Motions. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 249–259, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Policy Preference Detection in Parliamentary Debate Motions (Abercrombie et al., CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1024.pdf