Understanding Politics via Contextualized Discourse Processing
This work addresses the problem of understanding underlying political agendas for political entities, which is relevant for political science researchers and analysts.
The paper proposes a Compositional Reader model to capture political agendas from various textual sources like tweets and news articles. The model generates contextualized representations for entities, issues, and events, which are shown to be meaningful and effective through qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Politicians often have underlying agendas when reacting to events. Arguments in contexts of various events reflect a fairly consistent set of agendas for a given entity. In spite of recent advances in Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), those text representations are not designed to capture such nuanced patterns. In this paper, we propose a Compositional Reader model consisting of encoder and composer modules, that attempts to capture and leverage such information to generate more effective representations for entities, issues, and events. These representations are contextualized by tweets, press releases, issues, news articles, and participating entities. Our model can process several documents at once and generate composed representations for multiple entities over several issues or events. Via qualitative and quantitative empirical analysis, we show that these representations are meaningful and effective.