Blog post written by Katerina T. Frantzi and edited by Maria Gavriilidou
The corpus Hellenic Parliament Sittings, developed by the Laboratory of Informatics, Department of Mediterranean Studies of the Aegean University, includes minutes of meetings of the Greek Parliament and speeches of Parliament members, spanning the years 2011–2015. The resource has a total size of approximately 28.7 million words.
The corpus forms part of the dynamic Hellenic Parliamentary Corpus, H-ParCo, whose development was actually inspired by the participation of the University in the clarin:el network. The latest version of H-ParCo consists of language materials from all Plenary Sessions Minutes published by the Hellenic Parliament from 3 July 1989 to 31 April 2018; so in total, 29 years of Plenary Sessions Minutes. This version will soon be available through clarin:el, while the current published version, namely the Hellenic Parliament Sittings corpus, can already be downloaded under the CC-BY-NC license.
The collection process has not been an easy task: the Hellenic Parliament publishes data in three formats: as .pdf files, as .doc files and as .txt files. The data have been retrieved manually and classified according to the year and month they pertain to. All .pdf and .doc files have been converted into .txt files, so that they can be processed by existing clarin:el tools. The original files have also been kept and organized so that a one-to-one correlation to the corresponding .txt files is maintained. The corpus also contains rich metadata that specify the date, the parliamentary term and session, the meeting, the original file name, the corresponding .txt file name and the size in terms of number of words for each file.
The actual language material contained in the resource is exactly what is included in the publicized texts of the meetings; no manual or automatic intervention has taken place to alter the recorded language (for instance, to correct errors or to "sanitize" the language used).
Given that the development of H-ParCo is an ongoing process, future work involves:
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The continuous addition of minutes of recent Parliament Plenary Sessions (from 31 April 2018 onwards). These files are expected to be of the same formats as the previous ones, so the retrieval and processing procedures are also expected to be the same.
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The addition of minutes of older Parliament Plenary Sessions (before 3 July 1989). These are mostly image files (scanned images); this is expected to hamper the data retrieval and processing procedures, which is expected to be a lot more time-consuming, as the task of their conversion to .txt files is not a straightforward process.
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The development of a similar corpus consisting of the Parliament Plenary Sessions Minutes of the Democracy of Cyprus. In this case, the files are in .pdf. Therefore, the retrieval procedure is expected to be the same as that of H-ParCo.
Generally, H-ParCo is aimed at researchers of various domains and disciplines, such as Linguistics, Political Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Digital Humanities, Communicational Techniques, Political Sciences, Sociology, Gender Studies and more. It has been already successfully used for Political/Critical Discourse Analysis purposes (Georgalidou et al. 2017 and 2018 [in Greek]). It is also part of the CLARIN ERIC Family of Parliamentary corpora.
References
Γεωργαλίδου, Μ., Φραντζή, Κ. Τ. & Γιακουμάκης, Γ. (2018). Κοινοβουλευτικός λόγος, ευγένεια και επιθετικότητα στο ελληνικό κοινοβούλιο. Book of Abstract of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 19-21 April 2018.
Georgalidou, M., Frantzi, K. & Giakoumakis, G. (2017) Addressing adversaries in the Greek Parliament: a corpus-based approach. Book of Abstracts of the 13th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, Westminster 7-9 September 2017.
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