GPolS: A Contextual Graph-Based Language Model for Analyzing Parliamentary Debates and Political Cohesion

AbstractParliamentary debates present a valuable language resource for analyzing comprehensive options in electing representatives under a functional, free society. However, the esoteric nature of political speech coupled with non-linguistic aspects such as political cohesion between party members presents a complex and underexplored task of contextual parliamentary debate analysis. We introduce GPolS, a neural model for political speech sentiment analysis jointly exploiting both semantic language representations and relations between debate transcripts, motions, and political party members. Through experiments on real-world English data and by visualizing attention, we provide a use case of GPolS as a tool for political speech analysis and polarity prediction.