QT30: A Corpus of Argument and Conflict in Broadcast Debate

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3291–3300 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3291 QT30: A Corpus of Argument and Conflict in Broadcast Debate Annette Hautli-Janisz1, Zlata Kikteva1, Wassiliki Siskou1,2, Kamila Gorska3, Ray Becker3, Chris Reed3 1University of Passau, 2University of Konstanz, 3University of Dundee firstname.lastname@uni-passau.de, firstname.lastname@uni-konstanz.de, {kamila, ray, chris}@arg.tech Abstract Broadcast political debate is a core pillar of democracy: it is the public’s easiest access to opinions that shape policies and enables the general public to make informed choices. With QT30, we present the largest corpus of analysed dialogical argumentation ever created (19,842 utterances, 280,000 words) and also the largest corpus of analysed broadcast political debate to date, using 30 episodes of BBC’s ‘Question Time’ from 2020 and 2021. Question Time is the prime institution in UK broadcast political debate and features questions from the public on current political issues, which are responded to by a weekly panel of five figures of UK politics and society. QT30 is highly argumentative and combines language of well-versed political rhetoric with direct, often combative, justification-seeking of the general public. QT30 is annotated with Inference Anchoring Theory, a framework well-known in argument mining, which encodes the way arguments and conflicts are created and reacted to in dialogical settings. The resource is freely available at http://corpora.aifdb.org/qt30. Keywords: broadcast political debate, argumentation and conflict, Question Time, Inference Anchoring Theory 1. Introduction Political discussions and interviews on TV & radio are the public’s easiest access to opinions that shape poli- cies and thereby impact on their lives. One of the most viewed political talk show in the UK, ‘Question Time’ (henceforth, QT), is a topical debate in which audience members request justifications from a panel of polit- ical and societal figures on current topics of broader national interest. The debate is moderated and features scheduled as well as spontaneous questions from the audience to the panel. The panel responds to those questions by presenting their standpoints (or those of the stakeholders they represent), arguing for them and often engaging in a discussion with the other panel members. QT has been broadcast since 1979, is aired on Thursdays at 10:45 pm on BBC One and is repeated twice later in the week. It reaches a public of around 1.4 million viewers every week1 and is according to YouGov2 the most viewed topical debate in the UK. Despite the central role that broadcast political debate has on public opinion formation, there is a dire lack of resources that illustrate the ways in which the pub- lic interacts with political and societal figures in real time on issues that have an impact on their daily lives. Disagreeing with political decisions is one way of call- ing out individual issues, but the general tone in QT is one of asking for justifications of political deci- sions, sometimes diplomatically, but sometimes also outwardly hostile. In QT30, we use Inference Anchor- ing Theory (Budzynska et al., 2014b; Budzynska …

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