Annotating speaker stance in discourse: The Brexit Blog Corpus

The aim of this study is to explore the possibility of identifying speaker stance in discourse, provide an analytical resource for it and an evaluation of the level of agreement across speakers in the area of stance-taking in discourse. We explore to what extent language users agree about what kind of stances are expressed in natural language use or whether their interpretations diverge. In order to perform this task, a comprehensive cognitive-functional framework of ten stance categories was developed based on previous work on speaker stance in the literature. A corpus of opinionated texts, where speakers take stance and position themselves, was compiled, the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). An analytical interface for the annotations was set up and the data was annotated independently by two annotators. The annotation procedure, the annotation agreement and the co-occurrence of more than one stance category in the utterances are described and discussed. The careful, analytical annotation process has by and large returned satisfactory inter- and intra-annotation agreement scores, resulting in a gold standard corpus, the final version of the BBC.