Parlamint website

Coordinators of ParlaMint II: Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences) and Petya Osenova (Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgaria)

One of the most important characteristics of parliamentary data is its direct correspondence to the most recent events, including the ones with global impact on human health, social life and economics, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. By comparing the data synchronically and diachronically in a cross-lingual context, scientific and civil communities from various disciplines are able to track the pan-European discussion.

The project provides data for focused observations on trends, opinions, decisions on lockdowns and restrictive measures as well as on the consequences with respect to health, medical care systems, employment, etc. in times of emergencies. For the ParlaMint project, the emergency case is the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the methodology is scalable to other events as well, such as economic crises, environmental issues, etc.

The first ParlaMint project produced uniformly sampled, annotated and encoded comparable parliamentary corpora for 17 European countries. The corpora, which comprise reference and COVID-19 sections, contain rich metadata about the mandates, sessions, and speakers and their political party affiliations etc., are linguistically annotated for NER and Universal Dependencies morphological features and syntax, and encoded to a common and very strict schema, so their format is not merely interchangeable but also interoperable. The corpora have been released under the CC BY licence in the scope of the CLARIN.SI B-centre repository in three versions (1.0 with initial 4 languages, 2.0 with 16 languages, and 2.1 with corrected errata and 17 languages (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1432 and http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1431), not only in their source XML TEI format, but also in a number of derived and immediately useful formats. The ParlaMint corpora have also been, over and above what has been proposed in the project proposal, used in the DHH Hackathon, giving them increased visibility as well as providing useful feedback for the structure of the final version 2.1 corpora of the project. The project has thus produced a novel and highly valuable resource for a broad range of comparative trans-national SSH studies that is openly available and has already proved itself in practice.

The ParlaMint-PT corpus was created to cover the temporal period before, during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, which had such an impact on the health and lives of European and global citizens. The data was intended to observe how national parliaments had addressed public health issues and the relationship between political orientation and type of proposals (for example, on vaccination). In the Portuguese case, in addition to the pandemic period, the years covered by the corpus are also a time of major changes in the configuration of the party system. The corpus covers the last 10 months (January to October 2015) of the XII Legislature, and the full XIII (2015-2019) and XIV (2019-2022) Legislatures. A Legislature (Term of Office) covers the period between legislative elections. The corpus is divided into two subcorpora, according to the period each one covers: (i) the reference subcorpus covers sessions from 1st January 2015 until 31st October 2019; (ii) the COVID subcorpus comprehends sessions between 1st November 2019 and 22nd March 2022. The corpus has been annotated with PoS, dependencies and semantic information.

The set of multilingual corpora is available on the CLARIN repository.

The corpora are available for online queries through noSketchEngine, Kontext and TEITOK.