Actor Identification in Discourse: A Challenge for LLMs?

The identification of political actors who put forward claims in public debate is a crucial step in the construction of discourse networks, which are helpful to analyze societal debates. Actor identification is, however, rather challenging: Often, the locally mentioned speaker of a claim is only a pronoun ("He proposed that [claim]"), so recovering the canonical actor name requires discourse understanding. We compare a traditional pipeline of dedicated NLP components (similar to those applied to the related task of coreference) with …

actor actors analyze challenge claim construction cs.cl discourse identification llms networks political public speaker