Target Based Speech Act Classification in Political Campaign Text
Shivashankar Subramanian, Trevor Cohn, Timothy J. Baldwin · 2019
We study pragmatics in political campaign text, through analysis of speech acts and the target of each utterance.We propose a new annotation schema incorporating domainspecific speech acts, such as commissiveaction, and present a novel annotated corpus of media releases and speech transcripts from the 2016 Australian election cycle.We show how speech acts and target referents can be modeled as sequential classification, and evaluate several techniques, exploiting contextualized word representations, semi-supervised learning, task dependencies and speaker meta-data.