ParlaMint mini grant II

01/12/2021 to 31/05/2023

National parliamentary data is a verified communication channel between the elected political representatives and society members in any democracy. It needs to be made accessible and comprehensive - especially in times of a global crisis. With the recent advances of artificial intelligence, analytics over unstructured parliamentary data for many languages is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for reliable and trustworthy approaches in checking the veracity of information in contemporary society.
One of the most important characteristics of new 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 within a cross-lingual context, scientific and civil communities will be able to track pan-European discussion and can be quickly updated on any emerging topic.
The mission of the ParlaMint project is to turn existing contemporary multilingual and diverse cross-national parliamentary data into resources that are:
comparable, interpretable and highly communicative with respect to society (NGOs, citizens, researchers, etc.).
The project will provide data and tools 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 will be scalable to other events, such as economic crises, etc. Thus, the main aims are:
to compile a collection of parliamentary datasets (corpora) in a number of languages and in a harmonized format, covering both the current data and older, reference data, to process the corpora linguistically, to index the data with popular concordancers so that interested parties can search and extract the relevant comparable information, to show through appropriate use cases that the CLARIN resources and technology serve societal needs.
For accomplishing this mission a respective TEI-based standard schema has been developed and rich metadata has been added, such as members-of-parliament bios, parties' bios, ruling vs. opposition information and relations among all of them.
Thus, observations over democratic processes are approached through parliaments as digital bodies viewed through the following related strategies:
speaker and parties statistics (for instance, who spoke more and on which topic; who changed their mind on a certain topic; which party defends/opposes what proposals, etc.) topic modeling (which topics are most popular at what time; how topic change and interrelate, etc.) time and context-bound social tendencies (tendencies in policy making over time).
The ParlaMint project started with creating recent corpora of parliamentary sessions for 4 parliaments: Bulgarian, Croatian, Polish and Slovene. The project is currently being extended with 13 additional parliaments of the following countries: Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, the Netherlands, Turkey, UK. (To be released in March 2021.)

This particular grant will be used for compiling and harmonizing the transcriptions of Turkish parliament.

ParlaMint II will upgrade the XML schema and validation, extend the existing corpora to cover data at least to July 2022, add corpora for new languages, further enhance the corpora with additional metadata; and improve the usability of the corpora.