Parlameter – a Corpus of Contemporary Slovene Parliamentary Proceedings

The paper presents the Parlameter corpus of contemporary Slovene parliamentary pro-ceedings, which covers the VIIth mandate of the Slovene Parliament (2014–2018). The Parlameter corpus offers rich speaker metadata (gender, age, education, party affiliation)


Introduction
Parliamentary discourse is motivated by a wide range of communicative goals, from position-claiming, persuasion and negotiation to agenda-setting and opinionbuilding along ideological or party lines.It is characterized by role-based commitments and confrontation and the awareness of a multi-layered audience (Ilie 2017).The unique content, structure and language of records of parliamentary debates are all factors that make them an important object of study in a wide range disciplines in digital humanities and social sciences, such as political science (van Dijk 2010), sociology (Cheng 2015), history (Pančur and Šorn 2016), discourse analysis (Hirst et al. 2014), sociolinguistics (Rheault et al. 2016), and multilinguality (Bayley 2014).
Despite the fact that parliamentary discourse has become an increasingly important research topic in various fields of digital humanities and social sciences in the past 50 years (Chester and Bowring 1962;Franklin and Norton 1993), it has only recently started to acquire a truly interdisciplinary scope (Bayley 2014).Recent developments enable cross-fertilization of linguistic studies with other disciplines and indepth exploration of institutional uses of language, interpersonal behaviour patterns, interplay between language-shaped facts, and reality-prompted language ritualization and change (Ihalainen et al. 2016).
With an increasingly decisive role of parliaments and their rapidly changing relations with the public, mass media, executive branch and international organizations, further empirical research and development of integrative analytical tools are necessary in order to achieve a better understanding of parliamentary discourse as well as its wider societal impact, in particular with studies that represent diverse parts of society (women, minorities, marginalized groups) and cross-cultural studies (Hughes et al. 2013).

Parliamentary Corpora
The most distinguishing characteristic of records of parliamentary debates is that they are essentially transcriptions of spoken language produced in controlled and regulated circumstances.For this reason, they are rich in invaluable (sociodemographic) meta-data.They are also easily available under various Freedom of Information Acts set in place to enable informed participation by the public and to improve effective functioning of democratic systems, making the datasets even more valuable for researchers with heterogeneous backgrounds.
This has motivated a number of national as well as international initiatives (for an overview, see Fišer and Lenardič 2018) to compile, process and analyse parliamentary corpora.They are available for most countries within the CLARIN ERIC research infrastructure for language resources and technology, with the UK's Hansard Corpus being the largest (1.6 billion tokens) and spanning the longest time period  while corpora from other countries are significantly smaller (most comprise between 10 and 100 million tokens) and cover significantly shorter periods (mostly from the 1970s onwards).
The Slovene parliamentary corpus SlovParl 2.0 (Pančur 2016) contains minutes of the Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia for the legislative period 1990-1992 when Slovenia became an independent country.The corpus comprises over 200 sessions, almost 60,000 speeches and 11 million words.It contains extensive meta-data about the speakers, a typology of sessions and structural and editorial annotations and is uniformly encoded to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, a de-facto standard for encoding and annotating textual data in Digital Humanities.It is available under the CC-BY licence in the CLARIN.SI repository of language resources and via the CLARIN.SI concordancers (Pančur et al. 2017).SlovParl is thus an exemplary corpus but contains material from a quite limited, and not very recent time period.This makes the corpus of limited use for the rich body of research on recent parliamentary activities.
Contemporary Slovenian parliamentary debates are monitored by the analytical tool Parlameter 11 which makes use of linguistic as well as non-linguistic data, such as MPs' attendance and voting results.While this is a very useful tool for journalists and citizen scientists and gives valuable insight into contemporary parliamentary data, its functionality is confined to that of the tool and as such cannot be freely manipulated by scholars according to their specific research needs.
The goal of the research presented in this paper was to convert the Parlameter database into a freely and openly available linguistically annotated corpus enriched with session and speaker metadata, and to showcase the analyses that can be performed on such corpora via open-source tools for corpus analysis.Section 3 gives the basic information on the corpus structure and size, Section 4 presents the analysis of the corpus according to the text and speaker metadata by utilizing some of the best-known corpus analysis techniques, and Section 5 gives some conclusions and directions for further research.
While the focus of the paper is the parliamentary language material which we process with natural language processing and analyse with standard methods from corpus linguistics, the aim of the analysis is to inform media and political studies by transferring the presented methodology into these areas.

Corpus Compilation
The data dump from the Parlameter tool consisted of the minutes of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia from its VII th mandate spanning sessions that started from 2014-08-01 to 2018-05-24 (the complete mandated lasted till 2018-06-22).It was received from the Parlameter API (application programming interface) as a series of JSON files, which were first reorganised into a file containing speaker metadata and a file with the transcriptions of the minutes with speaker identifiers.The speaker metadata contains information about the speaker name and surname, and (for some speakers) their sex, date of birth, education, and party affiliation.The complete speaker metadata is available for the members of the parliament and of the government, but not for, e.g., visiting field experts, representatives of governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations or civil initiatives.This is why the analyses in Section 4 are performed based on the instances for which the metadata is available in the corpus.
The transcriptions contain the ID of the session, name of the session (e.g."4.izredna seja" -4 th extraordinary session), the date when the session started, and its speeches, each one with the ID of the speaker and a number of segments, roughly corresponding to paragraphs.As discussed below, the transcriptions also contain comments by the transcribers.

Normalisation of speaker data
The speaker data was normalised by removing extraneous spaces and removing honorifics (sometimes the name was preceded by, e.g., "Gospod" -Mr.).Furthermore, in Slovene it is relatively easy to infer the sex from the given name, so we also added sex information to the speakers missing it.

Normalisation of transcriptions
The JSON dump also contained empty speeches, as well as a significant amount of duplicated speeches.These were removed, as well as extraneous spaces in the text of the transcriptions.
Second, apart from the speeches, the minutes also contained 65,965 comments on verbal and non-verbal behaviour of the speaker or the members of parliament, and there are two types of such remarks.The first are written between slashes and are mostly comments on audible incidents, e.g., /nerazumljivo/ (incomprehensible), / oglašanje iz dvorane/ (comments from the hall), /znak za konec razprave/ (sign for the end of the discussion).The second type of comments are written between brackets and mainly denote voting results, e.g., (nihče), /nobody/, (10 članov) /10 members/, (proti 44) /44 against/.Both types of comments have been removed from the transcriptions for the current version of the corpus, as they are not part of the transcription proper and would significantly complicate further processing.Furthermore, the content of the comments is not uniform, with the same information written in various ways (e.g./smeh/ -laughter, /smeh iz dvorane/ -laughter from the hall, /smeh v dvorani/ -laughter in the hall), meaning that the values would have to be unified before being converted to appropriate corpus elements.

Linguistic annotation
In the second stage, the text of the transcriptions was automatically annotated with linguistic information.In particular, the text was tokenised, i.e. split into words, punctuation marks and spaces, and segmented into sentences, which was performed by the ReLDI tokeniser (Ljubešić et al. 2016).Second, the words were part-of-speech tagged and lemmatised, i.e. each word was assigned its context-dependent morphosyntactic description and non-marked form, e.g., the words in "V naši sredini" -In our midst are assigned the MSDs "Sl Ps1fslp Ncfsl" meaning preposition in the locative case; the possessive pronoun in the first person feminine singular locative with a plural owner number; and the feminine common noun in the singular locative, while the lemmas are "v naš sredina".The tagging and lemmatisation was performed with the ReLDI tagger (Ljubešić and Erjavec 2016) using its model for Slovene.Finally, the transcriptions were also tagged for named entities, i.e., names identified in the corpus were marked and categorised into five classes, those for persons, locations, organisations, for adjectives derived from a person's name (e.g."Cerarjev" -Cerar's), and a miscellaneous category.The named entity annotation was performed with Janes-NER (Fišer et al. 2018).

Corpus encoding
The corpus is encoded in XML, according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI Consortium 2017).The complete corpus is stored as one TEI document, which contains its TEI header with the metadata for the corpus, and its text body, containing the transcriptions, one division for each starting date of the sessions; each division is stored as a separate file, giving one root file for the corpus and 525 files for the divisions.
The TEI header contains extensive metadata for the corpus as a whole, e.g., its authors and funders, the source description, the list and numbers of elements used in the corpus, as well as the list of speakers and their metadata.Most metadata is given both in Slovene and English.

Corpus size
Some basic statistics regarding the corpus are given in Table 1.In total, the Parlameter corpus contains 371 sessions (as distinguished by their title) which spanned over 525 days, i.e., 1.4 days per session on average.If we count distinct sessions that started on a given day, the corpus contains 1,338 such sessions.The VII th mandate of the parliament heard 1,981 speakers who gave 133,287 speeches which contain almost 35 million words, i.e., 67 speeches per speaker and 260 words per speech on average.Due to a number of factors, such as different roles of the speakers in the parliament, the distribution is, of course, far from uniform, e.g., there is one speaker that gave 14,616 speeches, while 711 speakers gave only one speech.

Availability of the corpus
The Parlameter corpus is available through CLARIN.SI.CLARIN is the European research infrastructure for language resources and technologies, which makes digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen-scientists from all disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, through single sign-on access.CLARIN offers long-term solutions and technology services for deploying, connecting, analysing and sustaining digital language data and tools.CLARIN is organised as a network of national centres, with CLARIN.SI covering Slovenia.CLARIN.SI2 offers, inter alia, two concordancers for on-line corpus exploration, and a repository of language resources and tools, intended for their long-term archiving together with support for different types of licences and an unambiguous way for others to cite these resources, using Handle persistent identifiers.The landing page of each resource also gives a cross-reference to the concordancers for the particular corpus, and vice-versa.The repository also exposes its metadata, which is being harvested by a number of other services.
The Parlameter corpus is available through both CLARIN.SI concordancers, as well as for download from its repository, both as a TEI document and in the simpler vertical file format, under the liberal Creative Commons -Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence (Dobranić et al. 2019).In this way we hope to raise interest among other researchers to explore the corpus and make use of it in their research.

Corpus Analysis
By using the CLARIN.SI NoSketch Engine concordancer,3 we demonstrate the potential of the basic corpus analysis techniques (Gorjanc and Fišer 2013) for politology, history and other related humanities and social sciences disciplines that base their research on large volumes of language data.Concordances are lists of all examples of the search word or phrase from a corpus which are shown in the context they were used in and are equipped with the available metadata.Wordlists are comprehensive summarizations of the language inventory in the corpus, organized by frequency or alphabetically.Collocations are partly or fully fixed multi-word expressions which have become established through usage.Keywords are words which appear in the focus corpus more frequently than they would in the general language.Combined with the available text and speaker metadata, such as date, speaker gender or political affiliation, they provide a powerful analytical tool for discovering the commonalities and specificities of the linguistic footprint and trends by different types of speakers in the parliament as will be shown in the rest of this section.

Production volume and vocabulary size
As already presented in Table 1, the corpus contains nearly 41 million tokens or 35 million words.noSketch Engine also offers the lexicon size of the corpus, as given in Table 2, which shows that the corpus contains approximately 263,000 different word forms (so, inflected words, e.g., Slovenije) and over 104,000 different lemmas (so, base forms of words, e.g., Slovenija), and 1,080 different morphosyntactic tags (e.g.,Verb main present second plural).However, it should be noted that both lemmas and the tags are automatically assigned, so they also contain some annotation errors: the accuracy of morphosyntactic tags is around 94%, the accuracy of lemmas is above 99%.While the corpus contains parliamentary debates from the period 2014-2018, 62% of the material was recorded in 2015 and 2016.Given the parliamentary term, which lasted from 1 August 2014 to 14 April 2018, it is interesting to observe an 8% smaller production in 2017 compared to the year before since the last year of the term would be expectedly the busiest in order to wrap up the workplan and set the ground for a new election cycle.

Morphosyntactic specificities of the language in ParlaMeter
We performed a basic analysis of the morphosyntactic annotations of the corpus in form of the most significant differences in their frequencies between the Gigafida reference corpus of Slovene4 and the Parlameter corpus, which are given in Table 4. 5Table 4: Most salient differences in morphosyntactic descriptions between Gigafida 2.0 and Parlameter.The results show that the parliamentary speeches, as expected, contain more present tense verb forms, especially in the first and second person singular or plural (e.g., imamo -we have, pozdravljam -I greet, zaupate-you trust), as well as personal and demonstrative pronouns, the former most prominently as the first person singular personal pronoun (jaz -I).

Residual web
On the other hand, the parliamentary proceedings do not contain URLs or Roman numerals.More interestingly, they also contain significantly fewer possessive adjectives (e.g.torkovim -Tuesday's) and pronouns (njun -theirs [dual] ), proper names, numerals, personal pronouns in the dual number (naju -us two), or in second person singular accusative (nate -to you) than general Slovene.

Language and gender in Parlameter
Gender is recorded for all but one speaker in the corpus. 6In total, 1,965 speakers are represented, 62% of which are male and 38% female.Interestingly, the contribution from the speakers is not proportionate to the distribution according to their gender, with the male speakers contributing 71% of the tokens in the corpus and the female speakers 29%.On the speech level the difference is even more pronounced as the male speakers delivered 73% of the speeches while female speakers only 27%, indicating that, on average, the speeches given by female speakers were somewhat longer than those by male speakers.Table 6, which lists top-ranking 10 female and male speakers and their production in terms of tokens, shows that the most prolific male speakers produced nearly twice as much material as their female counterparts.Overall, all top 10 speakers except one (Miha Kordiš, male, the Levica party) have a leading role in one or more parliamentary or governmental bodies, including 2 ministers, both of which are female, 2 opposition deputy group chairs, who are both male, and the Chair of the National Assembly who is also male.Based on their roles in the parliament or the government, top-ranking speakers represent issues on culture, corruption, judiciary, finances, agriculture, foreign policy, education and infrastructure.In terms of political orientation, the largest opposition party SDS is best represented with 5 top-ranking male and 3 female speakers, including chair and vice-chair of their deputy group.Among the top-ranking female speakers, the entire political spectrum is represented while male speakers from the SD and DeSUS parties do not make the list, and the SMC party is only represented by the Chair of the National Assembly whose role is most likely predominantly procedural, not to promote the party agenda.In order to compare the topics discussed by female and male speakers in the Slovene parliament, we analysed their 100 top-ranking key lemmas, where we used the corpus of all female speakers as the target corpus against the reference corpus of all male speakers in the Parlameter corpus, and vice versa, so the two lists display the distinguishing features of each of the groups.By observing their contexts via concordances, we manually classified them into one of the 13 topics represented by the ministries in the Slovenian government: -agriculture, forestry and food -culture -defence -economy and technology -education, science and sport -environment and spatial planning -finance -health -foreign affairs -infrastructure -interior -justice -labour, family and social affairs -public administration In addition, we introduced 4 additional categories for words that could not be classified into any of the topics above: -interaction/procedural for keywords which referred to other people attending the session (e.g., references to names of other speakers, predsednik -chairman) or expressed procedural matters during the session (e.g., prisotni -present, dobrodošli -welcome) -style for keywords which were either distinctly colloquial or distinctly formal and were frequently used only by a single or very few speakers in order to achieve a special effect (e.g., penez, a very informal expression for money, šiht, a very informal expression for job) -ideology for keywords which were used to ideologically label an individual speaker or a group of speakers (e.g., levičarski -leftist, kapitalizem -capitalism) -multiple for keywords which were used in several topics (e.g., zgodnji -early, fantastičen -fantastic).
As can be seen from Table 7, the most frequent topics among the female speakers are health (35) and labour, family and social affairs (33), which are followed by public administration (13) and education, science and sport (8).Most of the 100 top-ranking keywords uttered by male speakers, on the other hand, could not be classified into a single topic because they were used either to achieve a stylistic effect (24), were general words that were used in multiple topics, such as descriptive adjectives or legal terms (22), or ideological expressions (6), all of which indicate a more discursive, debating style of the male speakers, but could also stem from the fact that the leading roles in that term were predominantly held by male members of parliament. 7Despite being much more infrequent than in the female part of the corpus overall, the most frequently represented specific topics by male speakers are infrastructure (9), interior (6), agriculture, forestry and food (5), and defence (5), suggesting a significant difference in the roles and interests of male and female speakers in the Slovene parliament.Illustrative examples of the 10 top-ranking female-and male-specific keywords with a manually assigned topic are listed in Tables 8 and 9.That the nature and style of male speeches is quite different from the female ones can also be seen from the analysis of the morphosyntactic types of 100 highest-ranking keywords for male and female speakers.While nouns are the most frequent category and are used equally frequently by both male and female speakers (44%), many more adjectives were found among the female top-ranking keywords (33% vs. 16%), while the male keywords had more adverbs (11% vs. 4%) and verbs (9% vs. 2%), which again could be related to the roles of the speakers in the parliament.However, given the results of our preliminary work on this dataset (Ljubešić et al. 2018, http://www.sdjt.si/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/JTDH-2018_Ljubesic-et-al_The-Parlametercorpus-of-contemporary-Slovene-parliamentary-proceedings.pdf), during which we removed the speakers that produced most of the linguistic material from the analysis, we see similar trends both in the gender-dependent keyword and morphosyntactic analysis, and are therefore rather in favour of accepting the observed differences as impact of gender and not role.

Language and party affiliation in Parlameter
Affiliation is recorded for only 113 speakers out of the 1982, however, these are responsible for 79% of the tokens in the corpus.Affiliation is considered as either deputy group membership or a role in the government, where it must be noted that in this version of the corpus the metadata reflect the situation at the beginning of the term and does not keep track of party membership transfers or resignations of ministers or members of parliament.Also, when elected members of parliament were later appointed as ministers, the metadata record only their party affiliation and records as ministers only those who were appointed without being first elected to the parliament.To facilitate more fine-grained and accurate use of the corpus in political science or contemporary history, we plan to refine the metadata for the next release of the corpus, adding also the MP's membership in the working bodies of the National Assembly, etc. Also, the metadata in the current version of the corpus do not flag the independent members of parliament who do not belong to any of the parliamentary parties and operate in the Independents deputy group, which is why they are not included in our analysis.
As Table 10 shows, the most prolific deputy group is the largest opposition party Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), whose 20 members contributed nearly 10 million tokens or 30% of the corpus.SDS is followed by the main governing party, Party of Modern Centre (SMC), whose 42 members contributed 7 million tokens or 22% of the corpus.It is interesting to note that in terms of the volume contributed to the corpus on one side and the number of speakers on the other, that this party was the least productive among the main parties, with a ratio of the percentage of tokens to the percentage of speakers (i.e., the relative token to speaker ratio) of 0.54, which means that this party generated a little bit more than a half of the material that would have been expected given their number of speakers and the overall activity of all the speakers.The Left (Levica) and New Slovenia (NSi) rank third and fourth, despite the fact that they had only 6 members each in the parliament, making them the most productive parties with a relative token to speaker ratio of 1.83 and 1.66.The Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia had as many as 12 elected MPs but contributed 1 million tokens less than the two previous parties, which makes them the second least productive party with a relative token to speaker ratio of 0.67.Next, we performed a manual analysis of the 100 top-ranking keywords of each political party against the rest of the corpus.These analyses display the distinct properties of one party that are not shared by other parties.Using the concordances, we classified the keywords into the same categories as in Section 4.1, the results of which are summarized in Tables 11 and 12. Unsurprisingly, due to the role of the main governing party SMC, practically all their top-ranking keywords are interactional elements with the other speakers or have a procedural nature (e.g., navzoč -present, glasovanje -voting, amandma -amendment).That DeSUS is a single-issue party can be seen from their keywords, which, apart from a surprisingly high proportion of interactive keywords, belong almost exclusively to the semantic field of retirement and pension (e.g., regres -holiday pay, valorizirati -to revalue, gmoten -material).Interestingly, even the topics of foreign affairs and culture are nearly completely absent from their keyword list, despite the fact that these ministers came from their party, suggesting that these topics are more or less evenly shared with other parties.SD, the third coalition party, clearly display their priority areas of agriculture, forestry and food (e.g., teran -Teran wine, fermentiran -fermented, kmetovati -to farm) and defence (e.g., vojakinja -female soldier, neeksplodiran -unexploded, strelivo -ammunition), which can be traced back to their ministers.
The largest opposition party SDS stands out from the rest by the amount of ideological keywords identified among the top-ranking keywords (e.g.tranzicijski -transitional, totalitarizem -totalitarism, lustracija -lustration).NSi and Levica, the opposition parties with the same number of MPs but from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both address the widest variety of issues (their keywords were classified into 13 out of 18 topics).The topics with nearly equal number of completely opposite keywords are economy and technology (e.g.soupravljanje -co-management for Levica vs. espejevec -private entrepreneur for NSi).While NSi mostly talks about the local issues related to their constituencies (e.g.samooskrba -self-sufficiency, posekan -cut down, obdelovati -farm), Levica stands out by signature stylistic devices which range from very informal (e.g.šlamastika -pickle, gazda -informal for master, nabijati -to bang on) to highly elevated registers (e.g.nemara -perhaps, onkraj -beyond, ducat -dozen) and displays the largest proportion of ideological vocabulary next to SDS (e.g. tovarišicacamerade, revizionizem -revisionism, imperializem -imperialism).SAB seems to stand out by a predominantly (local) administrative/procedural/governance vocabulary (e.g. proporcionalen -proportional, odpoklic -recall, dvokrožen -double-ballot) as well as a discursive, informal style of distinctly negative sentiment, which is characteristic of one of their members Vinko Möderndorfer (e.g.rešpektiram -honour, kozlarijanonsense, zmazek -disaster).
The verb trigger is the only one of the three examples that has a higher relative frequency in SlovParl but despite the greater relative frequency, Parlameter contains more collocation candidates, both in the direct and the metaphorical sense, such as trigger an investigation/indictment/lawsuit, or trigger an audit/bankruptcy.
It is interesting to note that the adjective southern is more frequently used and has more collocations in general in ParlaMeter despite the fact that in the secession period, links to the rest of former Yugoslavia were probably stronger and there were probably more open issues, signalling that certain topics were probably not discussed on purpose until the issues were resolved and the relations were established again.Especially interesting are all the neighbour-related collocations, which only appear in the Parlameter corpus, 30 years after Slovenia left Yugoslavia: southern neighbour / neighbours / neighbourhood / market / fruit, despite the fact that geographically speaking, the former Yugoslav republics, spread south-east, not south of Slovenia.The one major unsettled issue is the border with Croatia that has even been subject of international arbitration during the parliamentary term included in the Parlameter corpus, which is reflected in the top-ranking strong collocation južna meja/southern border.

Conclusions
In this paper we presented the Parlameter corpus of contemporary Slovene parliamentary proceedings.We analysed the linguistic production of the speakers according to the morphosyntactic annotation of the corpus and the speaker metadata.
We have shown that despite the fact that the material included in the corpus spans the period 2014-2018, the bulk of the material was recorded in the first two full years of the parliament.When contrasted against general Slovene, parliamentary speeches contain more present tense forms and personal and demonstrative pronouns.A comparison of male and female speakers shows that while male speakers take the floor more often than their female colleagues, it is the female speakers who make longer contributions.Female speakers mostly address the topics of health, labour, family and social affairs, public administration, and education, science and sport, while most of the keywords from male speakers do not belong to specific topics, which indicate a more discursive, debating style of the male speakers.When comparing speeches according to party lines, the most prolific deputy group is the largest opposition party Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) while the ruling Party of Modern Centre (SMC) is the least prolific one.The most productive parties with a relative token to speaker ratio are the smallest parties in this parliamentary term, the Left (Levica) and New Slovenia (NSi).The largest opposition party SDS stands out from the rest by the large amount of ideological keywords while Levica stands out by signature stylistic devices which range from very informal to highly elevated.NSi and Levica, the opposition parties with the same number of MPs but from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both address the widest variety of issues.With keywords belonging almost exclusively to the semantic field of retirement and pension, DeSUS lies on the other end of the spectrum as a single-issue party.A comparison with the SlovParl corpus of parliamentary debates from the period of Slovenia's independence, many more topics are identified in Parlameter, which understandable as a well-established state will need to take care of a full spectrum of issues whereas a new state will mostly be dealing with procedural issues and the new legislature.In the future we plan to enrich the corpus with additional session records of previous and the most recent parliamentary terms as well as with additional metadata available through the Parlameter system, such as voting data and accepted legislation, which are also valuable for addressing a number of research questions in various research communities.In parallel, we also plan to develop comparable corpora from other parliaments, starting with Croatian and Bosnian.

SUMMARY
The unique content, structure and language, as well as the availability of records of parliamentary debates are all factors that make them an important object of study in a wide range disciplines in digital humanities and social sciences.This has motivated a number of national as well as international initiatives to compile, process and analyse parliamentary corpora.This paper presents the Parlameter corpus of contemporary Slovene parliamentary proceedings, which covers the VIIth mandate of the Slovene Parliament (2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018).The Parlameter corpus offers rich speaker metadata (gender, age, education, party affiliation) and is linguistically annotated (lemmatization, tagging, named entity recognition).
The Parlameter corpus contains 371 sessions and 1,981 speakers who gave 133,287 speeches which contain almost 35 million words.In the paper we demonstrate the potential of the corpus analysis techniques for investigating political debates by analysing the linguistic production of the speakers according to the morphosyntactic annotation of the corpus and the speaker metadata.When contrasted against general Slovene, parliamentary speeches contain more present tense forms and personal and demonstrative pronouns.While male speakers take the floor more often than their female colleagues, the female speakers' contributions tend to be longer.Female speakers mostly address the topics of health, labour, family and social affairs, public administration, and education, science and sport, while most of the keywords from male speakers do not belong to specific topics, which indicate a more discursive, debating style of the male speakers.The most prolific deputy group overall is the largest opposition party Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) while the then ruling Party of Modern Centre (SMC) is the least prolific.The most productive parties with a relative token to speaker ratio are the smallest parties in that parliamentary term, the Left (Levica) and New Slovenia (NSi).The largest opposition party SDS stands out from the rest by the large amount of ideological keywords while Levica stands out by signature stylistic devices which range from very informal to highly elevated.NSi and Levica, the opposition parties with the same number of MPs but from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both address the widest variety of issues.With keywords belonging almost exclusively to the semantic field of retirement and pension, DeSUS lies on the other end of the spectrum as a single-issue party.A comparison with the SlovParl corpus of parliamentary debates from the period of Slovenia's independence, many more topics are identified in Parlameter, which understandable as a well-established state will need to take care of a full spectrum of issues whereas a new state will mostly be dealing with procedural issues and the new legislature.
The Parlameter corpus is available through both CLARIN.SI concordancers, as well as for download from its repository, both as a TEI document and in the simpler vertical file format, under the liberal Creative Commons -Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence.The corpus architecture allows for regular extensions of the corpus with additional Slovene data, as well as data from other parliaments, starting with Croatian and Bosnian.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: The TEI encoding of the corpus.

Table 1 :
Basic statistic of the Parlameter corpus.

Table 2 :
Lexicon sizes of the Parlameter corpus.

Table 3 :
Distribution of text quantity by year in Parlameter.

Table 5 :
Distribution of speakers and text production by gender in Parlameter.

Table 6 :
Top-ranking 10 female and male speakers and their text production in Parlameter.

Table 7 :
Topics of 100 top-ranking keywords of female and male speakers in Parlameter.

Table 8 :
Most frequent keywords, topics and word type among female speakers in Parlameter.N stands for nouns, Adj for adjectives, and NP for proper nouns (names).

Table 9 :
Most frequent keywords, topics and word type among male speakers in Parlameter.

Table 10 :
Distribution of speakers and text production by party affiliation in ParlaMeter with speakers with unknown affiliation removed. 8

Table 11 :
Topics of 100 top-ranking keywords of party members in Parlameter.

Table 13 :
Topics of the 100 top-ranking keywords in Parlameter and SlovParl.

Table 14 :
100 top-ranking keywords in Parlameter contrasted against SlovParl and vice versa.

Table 15 :
Comparison of collocations of južen, kriza and sprožiti in SlovParl and ParlaMeter.Topics or morphosyntactic categories are indicated in square brackets, and new collocations in Parlameter are highlighted in bold.