CLARIN-PLUS Workshop "Working with Parliamentary Records", Sofia 2017

Parliament speech has always been in the center of the humanitarian and societal interest with its influential language and content for the policy making as well as for the social and political environment. There are many ongoing initiatives on European and national levels for compiling digital collections of parliament data, varying from creation of parliament-focused corpora to task-oriented ones. Examples of the first kind are: EuroParl; the Dutch PoliMedia project on political debates; European Parliament Interpretation Corpus (EPIC); UK parliamentary proceedings, including nearly every speech given in the British Parliament from 1803-2005; speech data from the Czech parliament; and the Talk of Norway corpus, a collection of proceedings from the Norwegian parliament. Examples of the second kind are: War in Parliament (WIP); the language of ethnic conflict in Latvian parliamentary debates; linking the historical and contemporary political records (LIPARM), among many others.

The availability of big parliamentary multimodal data in digitized form poses a number of problems, related to its proper archiving, structuring, synchronizing, visualizing. It is not a trivial task to search in such data, to extract relevant information, to make observations on specific topics. Thus, adequate approaches are required for its focused, easy and efficient usage from various perspectives, such as political sciences, sociology, history, psychology, etc. and also from the perspective of multilinguality.

CLARIN-PLUS Workshop "Working with Parliamentary Records" aims to discover the ways in which NLP technology, developed within CLARIN, would be helpful for curating parliament records and for answering research questions in the field of Digital Humanities given in by parliamentary datasets. One such successful initiative was the Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus (ToE-TCC) project, within which the EU parliament debates have been presented as Linked Open Data. At the workshop, we will prepare an overview of the recent and on-going national and international projects and collections of parliamentary records. In addition to talks, there will be demonstrations, discussions and hands-on sessions.

This workshop took place in Sofia, Bulgaria from Monday, 27 March, to Wednesday, 29 March, 2017 and is the third in a series of four as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project. It aims to demonstrate the application strength of language and speech technology in the domain of the humanities and social sciences beyond the field of linguistics.