  We study pragmatics in political campaign text, through analysis of speech
acts and the target of each utterance. We propose a new annotation schema
incorporating domain-specific speech acts, such as commissive-action, and
present a novel annotated corpus of media releases and speech transcripts from
the 2016 Australian election cycle. We show how speech acts and target
referents can be modeled as sequential classification, and evaluate several
techniques, exploiting contextualized word representations, semi-supervised
learning, task dependencies and speaker meta-data.
