ParlaCLARIN Workshop: Creating and Using Parliamentary Corpora, Miyazaki 2018

Parliamentary data is a major source of socially relevant content. It is available in ever larger quantities, is multilingual, has rich metadata, and has the distinguishing characteristic that it is essentially a transcription of spoken language produced in controlled circumstances, which is now increasingly released also in audio and video formats. All those factors in combination require solutions related to its archiving, structuring, synchronization, visualization, querying and analysis. Furthermore, adequate approaches to its exploitation also have to take into account the need of researchers from vastly different Humanities and Social Sciences fields, such as political sciences, sociology, history, and psychology.

An inspiring CLARIN-PLUS cross-disciplinary workshop “Working with parliamentary records” that was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in Spring 2017, and a comprehensive overview of a multitude of the existing parliamentary resources within the CLARIN infrastructure clearly indicated a need for better harmonization, interoperability and comparability of the resources and tools relevant for the study of parliamentary discussions and decisions, not only in Europe but worldwide.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in compiling, annotating, structuring, linking and visualising parliamentary records that are suitable for research in a wide range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We invite unpublished original work focusing on the collection, analysis and processing of parliamentary records.

The workshop was a part of the 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2018) held in Miyazaki, Japan on Monday, 7 May, 2018.