Ines Rehbein, Josef Ruppenhofer, Julian Bernauer
Who is we? Disambiguating the referents of first person plural pronouns in parliamentary debates

Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2021), Düsseldorf, Germany, September 06th to September 09th, 2021

This paper investigates the use of first person plural pronouns as a rhetorical device in political speeches. We present an annotation schema for disambiguating pronoun references and use our schema to create an annotated corpus of debates from the German Bundestag. We then use our corpus to learn to automatically resolve pronoun referents in parliamentary debates. We explore the use of data augmentation with weak supervision to further expand our corpus and report preliminary results.