Exploring structural features for position analysis in political discussions

Cäcilia Zirn, Michael Schäfer, Michael Strube, Simone Ponzetto and Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim, Germany
Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Heidelberg, Germany
caecilia@informatik.uni-mannheim.de

Abstract

In the context of the NLP Unshared Task in PoliInformatics 2014 , we analyze the structure of FOMC discussions as potential features for position analysis. We access the length of discussion statements and show that the distinction between long opinionated statements and short spontaneous discussion elements improves the analysis of similarity among speakers. Furthermore, we explore the structure within dialogs by dividing them into subdialogs and representing the subsequence of speakers as graphs.
In this web demo, we present visualizations of our analysis including the subgraphs and the similarity among speakers.

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Jump directly to the list of detailed meeting anaylses.

Stability of Speaker Similarity

As we do not have a gold standard evaluating the correctness of the identified speaker similarities, we investigate how stable the similarities of the speaker pairs are across all meetings. Two speakers that are close in one meeting should be close in the other meetings, too, as they are not likely to change their position while being on the committee.
The following boxplot depicts the stability of the speaker similarity over all meetings for a given pair of speakers. (Currently four speaker pairs are shown in this demo).

Average Speaker Similarity

The following heatmap visualization depicts the average speaker similarity values over all analyzed meetings for a selected set of speakers. The cosine similarities for each speaker pair are ranging from dark red ( ≥ 0.1) to dark green ( ≥ 0.64).

Detailed analysis of individual FOMC meetings

We analyzed the transcripts of 27 FOMC meetings between 2005 and 2007. The detailed results of each meetings analysis can be accessed through the following links.

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20050202meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20050322meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20050503meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20050630meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20050809meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20050920meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20051101meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20051213meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20060131meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20060328meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20060510meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20060629meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20060808meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20060920meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20061025meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20061212meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070131meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070321meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070509meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070628meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070807meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070810confcall

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070816confcall

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20070918meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20071031meeting

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20071206confcall

Detailed analysis of meeting FOMC20071211meeting