The ParlSpeech data set: Annotated full-text vectors of 3.9 million plenary speeches in the key legislative chambers of seven European states (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
ParlSpeech V2 contains complete full-text vectors of more than 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, covering periods between 21 and 32 years. Meta-data include information on date, speaker, party, and partially agenda item under which a speech was held. This release note provides a more detailed guide to the data.
The ParlaMint corpora of parliamentary proceedings
Language Resources and Evaluation, 2022
This paper presents the ParlaMint corpora containing transcriptions of the sessions of the 17 European national parliaments with half a billion words. The corpora are uniformly encoded, contain rich meta-data about 11 thousand speakers, and are linguistically annotated following the Universal Dependencies formalism and with named entities. Samples of the corpora and conversion scripts are available from the project’s GitHub repository, and the complete corpora are openly available via the CLARIN.SI repository for download, as well as through the NoSketch Engine and KonText concordancers and the Parlameter interface for on-line exploration and analysis.
. A new dataset of Dutch and Danish party congress speeches
We present a new dataset of speeches given by Danish and Dutch politicians at party congresses between 1946 and 2017. The dataset is a unique collection of materials from different party archives and digital repositories. It offers a unique opportunity to analyse the issues discussed in these speeches, the positions taken and the rhetoric used by party elites over time and between countries. We describe the data and illustrate them with one application: a sentiment analysis that describes differences between parties and over time.
The GermaParl Corpus of Parliamentary Protocols
2018
This paper introduces the GermaParl Corpus. We outline available data, the data preparation process for preparing corpora of parliamentary debates and the tools we used to obtain hand-coded annotations that serve as training data for classifying debates. Beyond introducing a resource that is valuable for research, we share experiences and best practices for preparing corpora of plenary protocols.
ParlaMint II: Advancing Comparable Parliamentary Corpora Across Europe
Research Square (Research Square), 2024
The paper presents the results of the ParlaMint II project, which comprise comparable corpora of parliamentary debates of 29 European countries and autonomous regions, covering at least the period from 2015 to 2022, and containing over 1 billion words. The corpora are uniformly encoded, contain rich metadata about their 24 thousand speakers, and are linguistically annotated up to the level of Universal Dependencies syntax and named entities. The paper focuses on the enhancement made since the ParlaMint I project and presents the compilation of the corpora, including the encoding infrastructure, use of GitHub, the production of individual corpora, the common pipeline for producing their distribution, and use of CLARIN services for dissemination. It then gives a quantitative overview of the produced corpora, followed by the qualitative additions made within the Par-laMint II project, namely metadata localisation, the addition of new metadata, such as the political orientation of political parties, the machine translation of the corpora to English and its tagging with semantic classes, and the production of pilot speech corpora. Finally, outreach activities and further work are discussed.
ParlaMint: Comparable Corpora of European Parliamentary Data
2021
This paper outlines the ParlaMint project from the perspective of its goals, tasks, participants, results and applications potential. The project produced language corpora from the sessions of the national parliaments of 17 countries, almost half a billion words in total. The corpora are split into COVID-related subcorpora (from November 2019) and reference corpora (to October 2019). The corpora are uniformly encoded according to the ParlaMint schema with the same Universal Dependencies linguistic annotations. Samples of the corpora and conversion scripts are available from the project's GitHub repository. The complete corpora are openly available via the CLARIN.SI repository 1 for download, and through the NoSketch Engine 2 and KonText 3 concordancers as well as through the Parlameter 4 interface for exploration and analysis.
Multi-aspect Multilingual and Cross-lingual Parliamentary Speech Analysis
2022
Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide an exciting insight into elected politicians' opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Exiting research covers discussions within individual parliaments. In contrast, we apply advanced NLP methods to a joint and comparative analysis of six national parliaments (Bulgarian, Czech, French, Slovene, Spanish, and United Kingdom) between 2017 and 2020, whose transcripts are a part of the ParlaMint dataset collection. Using a uniform methodology, we analyze topics discussed, emotions, and sentiment. We assess if the age, gender, and political orientation of speakers can be detected from speeches. The results show some commonalities and many surprising differences among the analyzed countries.
Every Single Word: A New Data Set Including All Parliamentary Materials Published in Germany
Government and Opposition
In this article, we introduce a unique data set containing all written communication published by the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2017. Increasing numbers of scholars make use of protocols of parliamentary speeches, parliamentary questions or the texts of legislative drafts in various fields of comparative politics including representation, responsiveness, professionalization and political careers or parliamentary agenda studies. Since preparing parliamentary documents is rather resource intensive, these studies remain limited to single points in time, types of documents and/or policy areas. The long time horizon and various types of documents covered by our new comprehensive data set will enable scholars interested in parliaments, parties and representatives to answer various innovative research questions related to legislative studies.
Anföranden: Annotated and Augmented Parliamentary Debates from Sweden
2020
The Swedish parliamentary debates have been available since 2010 through the parliament’s open data web site Riksdagens öppna data. While fairly comprehensive, the structure of the data can be hard to understand and its content is somewhat noisy for use as a quality language resource. In order to make it easier to use and process – in particular for language technology research, but also for political science and other fields with an interest in parliamentary data – we have published a large selection of the debates in a cleaned and structured format, annotated with linguistic information and augmented with semantic links. Especially prevalent in the parliament’s data were end-line hyphenations – something that tokenisers generally are not equipped for – and a lot of the effort went into resolving these. In this paper, we provide detailed descriptions of the structure and contents of the resource, and explain how it differs from the parliament’s own version.
Using parsed and annotated corpora to analyze parliamentarians' talk in Finland
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2021
Funding information Academy of Finland Abstract We present a search system for grammatically analyzed corpora of Finnish parliamentary records and interviews with former parliamentarians, annotated with metadata of talk structure and involved parliamentarians, and discuss their use through carefully chosen digital humanities case studies. We first introduce the construction, contents, and principles of use of the corpora. Then we discuss the application of the search system and the corpora to study how politicians talk about power, how ideological terms are used in political speech, and how to identify narratives in the data. All case studies stem from questions in the humanities and the social sciences, but rely on the grammatically parsed corpora in both identifying and quantifying passages of interest. Finally, the paper discusses the role of natural language processing methods for questions in the (digital) humanities. It makes the claim that a digital humanities inquiry of parl...