Agreement and Disagreement: Comparison of Points of View in the Political Domain

The automated comparison of points of view between two politicians is a very challenging task, due not only to the lack of annotated resources, but also to the different dimensions participating to the definition of agreement and disagreement. In order to shed light on this complex task, we first carry out a pilot study to manually annotate the components involved in detecting agreement and disagreement. Then, based on these findings, we implement different features to capture them automatically via supervised classification. We do not focus on debates in dialogical form, but we rather consider sets of documents, in which politicians may express their position with respect to different topics in an implicit or explicit way, like during an electoral campaign. We create and make available three different datasets.