"We Demand Justice!": Towards Social Context Grounding of Political Texts
This addresses the challenge of pragmatic language understanding in political discourse for computational linguistics and social media analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks and models.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding ambiguous political statements on social media by defining the context needed to ground them in real-world entities, actions, and attitudes, and proposes two challenging datasets for benchmarking models like RoBERTa and GPT-3.
Social media discourse frequently consists of 'seemingly similar language used by opposing sides of the political spectrum', often translating to starkly contrasting perspectives. E.g., 'thoughts and prayers', could express sympathy for mass-shooting victims, or criticize the lack of legislative action on the issue. This paper defines the context required to fully understand such ambiguous statements in a computational setting and ground them in real-world entities, actions, and attitudes. We propose two challenging datasets that require an understanding of the real-world context of the text. We benchmark these datasets against models built upon large pre-trained models, such as RoBERTa and GPT-3. Additionally, we develop and benchmark more structured models building upon existing Discourse Contextualization Framework and Political Actor Representation models. We analyze the datasets and the predictions to obtain further insights into the pragmatic language understanding challenges posed by the proposed social grounding tasks.