Exploring structural features for position analysis in political discussions

In the context of the NLP Unshared Task in PoliInformatics 2014, we analyze the structure of FOMC discussions as potential features for position analysis. We access the length of discussion statements and show that the distinction between long opinionated statements and short spontaneous discussion elements improves the analysis of similarity among speakers. Furthermore, we explore the structure within dialogs by dividing them into subdialogs and representing the subsequence of speakers as graphs. In our web demo, we present visualizations of our analysis including the subgraphs and the similarity among speakers.