Annotation and Analysis of the PoliModal Corpus of Political Interviews Daniela Trotta Sara Tonelli Alessio Palmero Aprosio Annibale Elia Universita` di Salerno FBK FBK Universita` di Salerno [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract interviews in Italian, and analyze how the combi- nation of verbal and non-verbal elements can shed English. In this paper, we present the first new light into political agendas and politicians’ at- available corpus of Italian political inter- titude. By ‘multimodal’ we mean that the corpus is views with multimodal annotation, con- composed of manual transcriptions of interviews sisting of 56 face-to-face interviews taken broadcast on TV and annotated with information from a political talk show. We detail the not only about the linguistic structure of the utter- annotation scheme and we present a num- ances but also about non-verbal expressions2. ber of statistical analyses to understand the The corpus, which we call PoliModal, addresses relation between these multimodal traits the need to make up for the lack of Italian lin- and language complexity. We also ex- guistic resources for political-institutional com- ploit the corpus to test the validity of exist- munication and is annotated in XML following ing studies on political orientation and lan- the standard for the transcriptions of speech TEI guage use, showing that results on our data Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and In- are not as clear-cut as on English ones.1 terchange3. In all transcripts, interviewers, in- terviewees and other guests’ turns have been en- 1 Introduction riched with the manual annotation of non-lexical In the context of a political interview, the host, and semi-lexical aspects such as breaks, inter- typically a journalist, acts as a representative of ruptions, false starts, overlaps, interjections, etc. the audience. This means that, if a politician man- Furthermore, additional linguistic traits related to ages to convince or deal with the criticism that the language complexity, use of pronouns and per- host addresses, then her/his trustworthiness, reli- sons’ mentions have been automatically tagged, ability and credibility will be easily established. enabling an in-depth analysis of speakers’ atti- In this situation, a politician is judged not only tude and communication strategy. In this work based on one’s arguments and rhetorical choices, we present not only the corpus, which is made https://github. but also on the attitude, self-confidence, and in freely available at the link com/dhfbk/InMezzoraDataset general on an overall convincing behaviour. For , but also example, if a politician seems to be conversation- an analysis that, combining verbal and non-verbal ally dominant and manages interruptions to a sat- elements, shows how these traits contribute to isfactory degree, it is more likely that the host, making an interview more or less convincing. and therefore the audience, will be convinced by 2 Related work the arguments put forward by the interviewee. For this reason, analysing the combination of verbal In recent years, political language has received in- and non-verbal elements in a political interview creasing attention, especially in the Anglo-Saxon could be very interesting for scholars in political science and communication science, and in gen- 2According to (Allwood, 2008): “The basic reason for collecting multimodal corpora is that they provide material eral to study consensus mechanisms. In this light, for more complete studies of ‘interactive face-to-face shar- we present the first multimodal corpus of political ing and construction of meaning and understanding’ which is what language and communication are all about”. 1Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use per- 3P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and In- mitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 In- terchange. See more https://tei-c.org/release/ ternational (CC BY 4.0). doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TS.html#TSSAPA and American world, where it is possible to have persuasion and interruption during political inter- free access to speech transcriptions from govern- views. Their work, however, is mainly aimed ment portals and personal foundation websites, at studying the strategies for conversational dom- e.g. White House portal, William J. Clinton Foun- inance, and annotate specific traits accordingly. dation, Margaret Thatcher Foundation. This has Our work, instead, is more general, includes a dif- fostered research on political and media commu- ferent set of tags and integrates also automatic lin- nication and persuasion strategies (Guerini et al., guistic features. 2010; Esposito et al., 2015). However, not all languages are well represented 3 Description of the PoliModal corpus 4 in this kind of studies. According to LRE Map The PoliModal corpus includes the transcripts of there are currently 24 monolingual corpora for 56 TV face-to-face interviews of 14 hours - taken Italian, two of which concern spoken language, from the Italian political talk show “In mezz’ora in i.e. VoLIP (Alfano et al., 2014) and LUNA cor- piu”` broadcast from 24 September 2017 to 14 Jan- pus (Dinarelli et al., 2009), and one multimodal, uary 2018.The show follows a fixed format, with named ImagAct-ItalWorNet-Mapping (Bartolini interviews conducted by a journalist, Lucia An- et al., 2014); no entry includes an Italian corpus nunziata, to a guest, typically a prominent figure in for the political domain. Furthermore, researchers the political or cultural scene. A secondary guest in Italian politics have mainly focused on political may participate as well, usually a second journal- communication in the verbal modality, evaluating ist to comment on the debate. Each interview is monological discourse (Bolasco et al., 2006; Ce- done in the same limited time frame, 30 minutes, droni, 2010; Longobardi, 2010; Catellani et al., and no audience is present, so that applause and 2010; Bongelli et al., 2010; Zurloni and Anolli, any other type of reactions are not included in the 2010; Sprugnoli et al., 2016; Moretti et al., 2016) corpus. to study a politician’s lexical, textual or rhetori- The audio signal has been transcribed us- cal patterns. An exception is the work by Salvati ing a semi-supervised speech-to-text methodology and Pettorino (2010), that diachronically analy- (Google API + manual correction). All hesita- ses some of the suprasegmental aspects of Berlus- tions, repetitions and interruptions of the original coni’s speeches from 1994 to 2010. The corpus, interview have been included. The output has been however, is not available for further studies. further segmented into turns, and punctuation has Concerning political corpora developed specif- been added, mainly to delimit sentence boundaries ically for conversation analysis, Bigi et al. (2011) when they were not ambiguous. present a multimodal corpus of political debates at It is important to note that, even if transcription the French National Assembly, on May 4th, 2010 seems to be an objective task, it involves a cer- and introduce an annotation scheme for a politi- tain degree of interpretation. Indeed, the inclusion cal debate dataset which is mainly in the form of of the punctuation necessary to make the writing video and audio annotations. Navarretta and Pag- comprehensible, as well as the selection of non- gio (2010) deal with the identification of interlocu- verbal messages and non-verbal expressions (in- tors via speech and gestures in annotated televised terjections, laughter, unfinished words, etc.) are political debates in British and American English. interpretative choices aimed at revealing a sense.5 Other papers have focused primarily on visual as- Therefore, in the case of ambiguous sentences, pects (gaze, gestures, facial expressions) of com- they have been identified manually, mainly look- municative interaction during political talk shows ing at the context of the enunciation. According to or parliamentary speeches (D’Errico et al., 2010). (Ducrot, 1995), in fact, it is not possible to under- The most similar approach to ours is presented stand a communicative act without knowing the in Koutsombogera and Papageorgiou (2010). The context in which it occurs. The context is there- authors analyse a Greek multimodal corpus of 10 fore essential to choose one of the possible inter- face-to-face television interviews focusing on non- pretations of ambiguous expressions. verbal aspects in order to study the attempts of 5As (Portelli, 1985) reminds us: “La punteggiatura serve 4LRE Map is a mechanism intended to monitor the use sia a scandire il ritmo che a gerarchizzare sintatticamente and creation of language resources by collecting information il discorso; non sempre le due funzioni coincidono, per cui on both existing and newly-created resources, free available trascrivendo si e` costretti spesso optare per l’una a danno at http://lremap.elra.info/ dell’altra” In PoliModal, annotation has been done using corresponding tag is del. We include these in XML as markup language and following the TEI our annotation since several past studies (Simone, standard for Speech Transcripts in terms of ut- 1990; Bazzanella, 1992; Tannen, 1989) high- terances. The linguistic resource has currently lighted their importance in spontaneous speech, 100,870 tokens and includes interviews to politi- mentioning in particular the role of repetitions cians covering all the Italian political spectrum in controlling the in-progress textual design of (from the extreme right