Paper ID: 2112.05438

DEBACER: a method for slicing moderated debates

Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Alexandre Alcoforado, Enzo Bustos, André Seidel Oliveira, Rodrigo Gerber, Naíde Müller, André Corrêa d'Almeida, Bruno Miguel Veloso, Anna Helena Reali Costa

Subjects change frequently in moderated debates with several participants, such as in parliamentary sessions, electoral debates, and trials. Partitioning a debate into blocks with the same subject is essential for understanding. Often a moderator is responsible for defining when a new block begins so that the task of automatically partitioning a moderated debate can focus solely on the moderator's behavior. In this paper, we (i) propose a new algorithm, DEBACER, which partitions moderated debates; (ii) carry out a comparative study between conventional and BERTimbau pipelines; and (iii) validate DEBACER applying it to the minutes of the Assembly of the Republic of Portugal. Our results show the effectiveness of DEBACER. Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Political Documents, Spoken Text Processing, Speech Split, Dialogue Partitioning.

Submitted: Dec 10, 2021