More than Word Cooccurrence: Exploring Support and Opposition in International Climate Negotiations with Semantic Parsing

Pablo Ruiz (1) , Clément Plancq (1) , Thierry Poibeau (1)

1 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094

Text analysis methods widely used in digital humanities often involve word co-occurrence, e.g. concept co-occurrence networks. These methods provide a useful corpus overview, but cannot determine the predicates that relate co-occurring concepts. Our goal was identifying propositions expressing the points supported or opposed by participants in international climate negotiations. Word co-occurrence methods were not sufficient, and an analysis based on open relation extraction had limited coverage for nominal predicates. We present a pipeline which identifies the points that different actors support and oppose, via a domain model with support/opposition predicates, and analysis rules that exploit the output of semantic role labelling, syntactic dependencies and anaphora resolution. Entity linking and keyphrase extraction are also performed on the propositions related to each actor. A user interface allows examining the main concepts in points supported or opposed by each participant, which participants agree or disagree with each other, and about which issues. The system is an example of tools that digital humanities scholars are asking for, to render rich textual information (beyond word co-occurrence) more amenable to quantitative treatment. An evaluation of the tool was satisfactory.

Mots clés: climate diplomacy; semantic role labelling; Digital Humanities

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Pablo Ruiz, Clément Plancq, Thierry Poibeau. More than Word Cooccurrence: Exploring Support and Opposition in International Climate Negotiations with Semantic Parsing. LREC: The 10th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, ELRA, May 2016, Portorož, Slovenia. pp.1902. ⟨hal-01326692⟩