Rhetorical Strategies in the UN Security Council: R hetorical S tructure T heory and Conflicts (2024)

Abstract: More and more corpora are being annotated with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees, often in a multi-layer scenario, as analyzing RST annotations in combination with other layers can lead to a deeper understanding of texts. To date, prior work on RST for the analysis of diplomatic language however, is scarce. We are interested in political speeches and investigate what rhetorical strategies diplomats use to communicate critique or deal with disputes. To this end, we present a new dataset with RST annotations of 82 diplomatic speeches aligned to existing Conflict annotations (UNSC-RST). We explore ways of using rhetorical trees to analyze an annotated multi-layer corpus, looking at both the relation distribution and the tree structure of speeches. In preliminary analyses we already see patterns that are characteristic for particular topics or countries.

## introduction the united nations security council (unsc) meetings offer a unique longitudinal, crossthematic resource on diplomatic interactions. transcriptions of these meetings @xcite are a valuable corpus to study language use and communication style in an international relations context. in this paper, we study rhetorical style in diplomatic speech, by analyzing unsc speeches from the perspective of rhetorical structure theory (rst) @xcite . rst aims to capture the structure of a text by combining its elementary discourse units (edus) into one single, hierarchical tree structure. rst trees have proven to be useful in several downstream tasks, including characterizing genre distinctions @xcite , investigating text complexity @xcite and fake news analysis @xcite . however, little work has been done on rst in political and diplomatic context, with a notable exception presented by @xcite . we address this gap by presenting a new corpus of 82 unsc speeches annotated with rst trees. the resulting corpus (henceforth referred to as unsc-rst) overlaps with our earlier work @xcite , in which we annotated verbal conflicts in unsc speeches. in this paper, we present a multi-layer corpus of both rst trees and linguistic markers of conflicts. we demonstrate how combining the two layers can reveal strategies in verbalizing disputes in a diplomatic setting. the main contributions of this paper are: first, we present a new corpus with rst annotations for 82 diplomatic speeches from the unsc. we adopt the rst annotation guidelines from earlier work @xcite @xcite , but make amendments tailored to the characteristics of diplomatic language. we include and discuss inter-annotator agreement, and publish our annotation guidelines. second, we combine our obtained rst annotations with earlier annotations of conflict over the same texts, and use insights from argumentation analysis @xcite , to demonstrate how conclusions can be drawn on strategies to express conflict. we compare the rhetorical style used by different countries (the five permanent members of the unsc, plus ukraine) and in different topics (debates concerning the situation in ukraine, and the women, peace and security agenda), and show, for example, that conflicts are not as often supported by causal or justification relations as one might expect. our work provides an empirical basis for political science and international relations researchers who are interested in understanding rhetorical styles used by representatives of different countries and in different contexts. the dataset, guidelines and code are available at: https://github.com/ linatal/rhetorical_unsc ## background this section first provides an overview of earlier work related to rst, and then describes the unsc conflicts corpus that our work is based on. ## annotations and data in the following, we describe our annotation guidelines, the annotation procedure, and corpus statistics. ## methods in this section, we describe the kinds of quantitative and qualitative analyses that we performed; the corresponding results will follow in the next section. ## conclusion we present a new corpus with rst annotations on 82 speeches given in the unsc, aligned with conflict annotations from the unsc conflict corpus. we report an average inter-annotator agreement of 0,44. by jointly analyzing rst trees and conflict annotations, we demonstrate how rhetorical analysis can help characterizing the verbalized disagreements or critiques as being more argumentative or having a more narrative style. comparing paragraphs that contain conflicts with those that do not, we see that the former on average have rhetorical structures that focus on a central statement, rather than having several statements of same importance. comparing speeches of six countries in the council, we only see a larger difference between conflicts and non-conflicts for the chinese speeches. when comparing values between countries, they maintain their rhetorical style, with china always having the flattest, and the united kingdom the most centralized rhetorical structure. we see the work presented here as one of the first to use rst to analyze the rhetorical style of diplomats. more generally, we contribute to exploring ways of using rst trees in the analysis of a multilayer corpus. in future work we want to expand not only the corpus with more topics and speeches, but also the set of analysis methods. for example, we will have a closer look at patterns of rhetorical relations, and whether some relations co-occur more often than others, which might yield more insights on rhetorical strategies used by diplomats. based on our presented tree structure analysis, it would also be interesting to compare trees that contain an edu marked as conflict as their central nucleus (and thus highlight the criticism) with trees where the conflicts are hidden in higher parts of the trees (which might serve to weaken it). our analyses show promising results, and open up a new direction of research, combining conflict annotations (which are less time-consuming to obtain than rst trees) with manually evaluated and corrected rst parser output, in order to investigate on larger scale in potential future work.