ParlaMint: Comparable Parliamentary Corpora

The CLARIN ParlaMint project is compiling comparable parliamentary corpora for a number of countries and languages.

ParlaMint corpora are interoperable, i.e. encoded to a very constrained common ParlaMint schema, a specialisation of the Parla-CLARIN recommendations, which are a customisation of the TEI Guidelines. Common scripts should process the common data in any ParlaMint corpus, despite the differing parliamentary systems of the countries, the kind of information included in the corpora, and, of course, language.

The latest version of ParlaMint is 2.1 which contains corpora for 17 countries (and 16 languages) and is available from the CLARIN.SI repository (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1432), also with SoA linguistic annotations (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1431). The background and 2.1 corpus is further described in:

Erjavec, T., Ogrodniczuk, M., Osenova, P. et al. The ParlaMint corpora of parliamentary proceedings. Language Resources & Evaluation (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-021-09574-0

We are now working on extending the ParlaMint corpora with newer proceedings and with new countries, languages, and modalities, cf. the CLARIN ERIC ParlaMint project description.

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This Git repository contains the ParlaMint XML schemas, the scripts used to validate and convert the ParlaMint TEI XML corpora to some useful derived formats, and samples of the ParlaMint corpora:

• Contributing to ParlaMint repository is described in CONTRIBUTING.md file
  • git and GitHub setup
  • installing prerequisites
• Running make help in repository root folder provides make targets list with description.
• The Schema folder contains the schemas for validating the four types of files present in the corpora. The README in this directory provides more information.
• The Scripts folder contains the XSLT scripts (and their Perl wrappers) used to:
  • finalize the corpora submitted by the project partners to V2.1;
  • validate the corpora (in addition to schema validation also for links and metadata consistency);
  • convert the TEI encoded corpora to derived formats.
• The Data folder contains sample country directories that should include:
  • ParlaMint-XX.xml: teiCorpus root file of the sample with (e.g. speaker and party) metadata and XIncludes to its component TEI files;
  • ParlaMint-XX_*.xml: sample TEI component, a few speeches from the full text (typically 1 day of speeches);
  • ParlaMint-XX.ana.xml: teiCorpus root file for the linguistically (UD and NER) annotated sample, including annotation metadata;
  • ParlaMint-XX_*.ana.xml: ParlaMint-XX_*.xml + UD and NER annotations;
  • ParlaMint-XX_*.conllu: ParlaMint-XX_*.ana in UD CoNLL-U format (also includes NER annotations)
  • ParlaMint-XX_*-meta.tsv: Speech metadata, with type and name of speaker, political party, etc.;
  • ParlaMint-XX_*.txt: plain text of each speech, with speech id;
  • ParlaMint-XX_*.vert: vertical format, as used by CQP/CWB, (no)Sketch Engine and KonText concordancers.