The Pragmatics behind Politics: Modelling Metaphor, Framing and Emotion in Political Discourse

Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot, Verna Dankers, David Abadi, Agneta Fischer, Ekaterina Shutova


Abstract
There has been an increased interest in modelling political discourse within the natural language processing (NLP) community, in tasks such as political bias and misinformation detection, among others. Metaphor-rich and emotion-eliciting communication strategies are ubiquitous in political rhetoric, according to social science research. Yet, none of the existing computational models of political discourse has incorporated these phenomena. In this paper, we present the first joint models of metaphor, emotion and political rhetoric, and demonstrate that they advance performance in three tasks: predicting political perspective of news articles, party affiliation of politicians and framing of policy issues.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.402
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4479–4488
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.402
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.402
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot, Verna Dankers, David Abadi, Agneta Fischer, and Ekaterina Shutova. 2020. The Pragmatics behind Politics: Modelling Metaphor, Framing and Emotion in Political Discourse. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 4479–4488, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Pragmatics behind Politics: Modelling Metaphor, Framing and Emotion in Political Discourse (Huguet Cabot et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.402.pdf
Code
 littlepea13/mtl_political_discourse