No source, born digital.
Contributions to Contemporary History is one of the central Slovenian scientific historiographic journals, dedicated to publishing articles from the field of contemporary history (the 19th and 20th century).
The journal is published three times per year in Slovenian and in the following foreign languages: English, German, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Italian, Slovak and Czech. The articles are all published with abstracts in English and Slovenian as well as summaries in English.
Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino je ena osrednjih slovenskih znanstvenih zgodovinopisnih revij, ki objavlja teme s področja novejše zgodovine (19. in 20. stoletje).
Revija izide trikrat letno v slovenskem jeziku in v naslednjih tujih jezikih: angleščina, nemščina, srbščina, hrvaščina, bosanščina, italijanščina, slovaščina in češčina. Članki izhajajo z izvlečki v angleščini in slovenščini ter povzetki v angleščini.
V prispevku predstavimo korpus sodobnih parlamentarnih razprav
Parlameter, ki vsebuje razprave 7. mandata slovenskega Državnega zbora
(2014-2018). Korpus Parlameter vsebuje bogate metapodatke o govorcih (spol,
starost, izobrazba, strankarska pripadnost) in je jezikoslovno označen
(lematizacija, tegiranje), kar omogoča številne raziskave s področja
digitalne humanistike in družboslovja. V prispevku prikažemo potencial
korpusnoanalitičnih tehnik za raziskovanje političnih razprav. Korpusna
arhitektura je zasnovana tako, da omogoča širitev korpusa na druga časovna
obdobja, prav tako pa tudi vključevanje gradiv drugih parlamentov, začenši s
hrvaškim in bosanskim.
Ključne besede: parlamentarne razprave, izdelava korpusa,
jezikovne tehnologije, korpusna analiza
The paper presents the Parlameter corpus of contemporary
Slovene parliamentary proceedings, which covers the VIIth mandate of the
Slovene Parliament (2014-2018). The Parlameter corpus offers rich speaker
metadata (gender, age, education, party affiliation) and is linguistically
annotated (lemmatization, tagging), which boost research in several digital
humanities and social sciences disciplines. We demonstrate the potential of
the corpus analysis techniques for investigating political debates. 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.
Keywords: parliamentary proceedings, corpus construction,
language technology, corpus analysis
Parliamentary discourse is motivated by a wide range of communicative goals, from position-claiming, persuasion and negotiation to agenda-setting and opinion-building 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 in-depth 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).
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 (1803-2005) 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
ParlameterParlameter, https://parlameter.si.
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.
The data dump from the Parlameter tool consisted of the minutes of the National
Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia from its VIIth
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” - 4th 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the TEI text body date divisions contain a division for each session, and then the utterances for each speaker, each one containing one or more segments, which then contain the annotated transcription.
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 VIIth 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.
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.SICLARIN Slovenia, http://www.clarin.si/info/about/.
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.
By using the CLARIN.SI NoSketch Engine concordancer,NoSketch Engine @ CLARIN.SI, https://www.clarin.si/noske/.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.
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 (see Table 3), 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.
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 Slovene
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).
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.
As Table 5 shows, gender is recorded for all but one speaker in the corpus.
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:
In addition, we introduced 4 additional categories for words that could not be classified into any of the topics above:
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.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), 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.
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 (see Table 12). 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 Table 11.
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. tovarišica –
camerade, 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,
kozlarija - nonsense, zmazek - disaster).
Finally, we observe the zeitgeist of the Parlameter corpus by comparing it with its older and smaller cousin, the SlovParl corpus, which contains material from the period of Slovenia’s independence (1990-1992). First, we created keyword lists with each of the two corpora acting as a focus and a reference corpus (see Table 14). We then manually classified 100 top-ranking keywords into the same categories as in Section 4.1, with the following additional categories:
If we disregard the differences in the mentions of the active politicians in the two periods, which are the most frequent category, most of the top-ranking keywords in both corpora belong to procedural and legal issues, which are clearly different in a newly established state and a state integrated in the EU (see Table 13). Apart from that, many more topics are identified in the Parlameter corpus, such as economy and technology, foreign affairs and health, which again is not surprising as a well-established state will need to take care of a full spectrum of issues.
To illustrate differences in the zeitgeist of both corpora, we extracted the strongest collocations of the following 3 expressions, which are frequent in both corpora, taking into account the collocation candidates that appear at least 5 times immediately next (left or right) to the headword, and analysed the first 50 collocation candidates:
As can be seen from Table 15, the biggest difference in relative frequency
between the two corpora is observed for the noun crisis, which is more than twice as frequent in Parlameter
compared to SlovParl, despite the fact that the early 1990s were marked by a
long and bloody war in the Balkans as well as severe economic hardship
related to change of the economic and political system. Parlameter contains
the largest number of new collocation candidates that indicate issues that
were not present in the period of SlovParl, such as migrant/refugee/humanitarian/security crisis. On the other hand,
the secession period was marked by constitutional/parliamentary crisis, which are not observed in the
late 2010s. Interestingly, SlovParl contains more metaphorical collocations
which are not prominent in the Parlameter corpus, such as mental/social/welfare/moral crisis. Collocations containing
geographical terms indicate the key political, military and social hotspots
from that period: Yugoslav/Gulf crisis in early
1990s, and Ukraine/Greek crisis in late 2010s. An
analysis of key verbal collocates with the noun crisis reveals another
interesting observation, which is that in SlovParl, all the verbs are about
solving the crisis (to solve/resolve/untangle the
crisis), whereas in Parlameter, politicians mostly use verbs that
discuss the beginnings or deepening of the crisis (crisis
sets in/appears/starts/hits, to trigger/deepen
the crisis).
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.
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.
The work described in this paper was funded by the Slovenian Research Agency within the national basic research project “Resources, methods, and tools for the understanding, identification, and classification of various forms of socially unacceptable discourse in the information society” (J7-8280, 2017-2019) and the Slovenian research infrastructure for language resources and technology CLARIN.SI.
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 (2014-2018). 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.
Edinstvena vsebina, struktura in jezik, pa tudi dostopnost prepisov parlamentarnih razprav so dejavniki, zaradi katerih so le-ti pomemben predmet raziskav v številnih znanstvenih disciplinah digitalne humanistike in družboslovja. To je motiviralo številne nacionalne in mednarodne iniciative za izgradnjo, označevanje in analizo parlamentarnih korpusov. V tem prispevku predstavimo korpus sodobnih parlamentarnih razprav Parlameter, ki vsebuje razprave 7. mandata slovenskega Državnega zbora (2014-2018). Korpus Parlameter vsebuje bogate metapodatke o govorcih (spol, starost, izobrazba, strankarska pripadnost) in je jezikoslovno označen (lematizacija, tegiranje, imenske entitete).
Korpus Parlameter vsebuje 371 razprav in 1.981 govorcev, ki so prispevali 133.287 govorov oziroma 35 milijonov besed. V prispevku prikažemo potencial korpusnoanalitičnih tehnik za raziskovanje političnih razprav z analizo jezikovne produkcije govorcev glede na morfosintaktične oznake in metapodatke o govorcih. Primerjava s splošno slovenščino pokaže, da v parlamentarnih govorih izstopajo sedanjiške oblike ter osebni in kazalni zaimki. Čeprav moški govorci spregovorijo večkrat, so govori žensk daljši. Ženske večinoma razpravljajo o temah, kot so zdravje, delo, družina in sociala, javna uprava ter izobraževanje, znanost in šoprt, večina ključnih besed v moških govorih pa ni vezanih na določeno tematiko, kar nakazuje bolj diskurziven, razpravljalski slog moških govorcev. V celoti gledano je najbolj produktivna strankarska skupina največja opozicijska stranka SDS, medtem ko je vladajoča stranka SMC v korpusu zastopana z najmanj izrečenimi besedami. Najvišji relativni delež števila pojavnic na govorca imata najmanjši parlamentarni stranki tega sklica Levica in NSi. Največja opozicijska stranka SDS izstopa po izrazito velikem obsegu ideološko obarvanih ključnih besed, Levica pa po specifičnih slogovnih figurah, ki so tako zelo neformalne kot zelo povzdignjene. NSi in Levica, opozicijski stranki z enakim številom poslancev a s povsem različnih polov političnega spektra, obe naslavljajta največje število tematik. Po drugi strani pa s ključnimi besedami, ki skoraj v celoti spadajo v pomensko polje upokojevanja in pokojnin, pa je povsem obratno pri stranki DeSUS, ki s tem utrjuje svoj status problemske stranke. Primerjava s korpusom SlovParl iz obdobja slovenske osamosvojitve kaže, da je v korpusu Parlameter obravnavanih veliko več tem kot v korpusu SlovParl, kar je razumljivo, saj se mora uveljavljena država ukvarjati s celotnim spektrom problematik, medtem ko se novo ustanovljena država posveča predvsem priceduralnim vprašanjem in sprejemanju nove zakonodaje.
Korpus Parlameter je dostopen preko obeh konkordančnikov v okviru raziskovalne infrastructure CLARIN.SI, prav tako pa ga je mogoče prenesti z repozitorija v format TEI, pa tudi v preprostejšem vertikalnem formatu pod licenco Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0). Korpusna arhitektura je zasnovana tako, da omogoča širitev korpusa na druga časovna obdobja, prav tako pa tudi vključevanje gradiv drugih parlamentov, začenši s hrvaškim in bosanskim.