TEC: A Time Evolving Contextual Graph Model for Speaker State Analysis in Political Debates

TEC: A Time Evolving Contextual Graph Model for Speaker State Analysis in Political Debates

Ramit Sawhney, Shivam Agarwal, Arnav Wadhwa, Rajiv Shah

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3552-3558. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/489

Political discourses provide a forum for representatives to express their opinions and contribute towards policy making. Analyzing these discussions is crucial for recognizing possible delegates and making better voting choices in an independent nation. A politician's vote on a proposition is usually associated with their past discourses and impacted by cohesion forces in political parties. We focus on predicting a speaker's vote on a bill by augmenting linguistic models with temporal and cohesion contexts. We propose TEC, a time evolving graph based model that jointly employs links between motions, speakers, and temporal politician states. TEC outperforms competitive models, illustrating the benefit of temporal and contextual signals for predicting a politician's stance.
Keywords:
Machine Learning Applications: Humanities
Natural Language Processing: NLP Applications and Tools