A Corpus of Grand National Assembly of Turkish Parliament's Transcripts

In parliaments throughout the world, decisions that are taken directly or indirectly lead to events that affect the society. Eventually, these decisions affect other societies, countries and the world. Thus, transcriptions of these are important to people who want to understand the world, namely historians, political scientists and social scientists in general. Compiling these transcripts as a corpus and providing a convenient way to query the contents is also important from the point of linguists and NLP researchers. Currently, many parliaments provide these transcriptions as free text in PDF or HTML form. However, it is not easy to obtain these documents and search the interested subject. In this paper, we describe our efforts for compiling the transcripts of Grand National Assembly of Turkish Parliament (TBMM) meetings which span nearly a century between 1920 and 2015. We have processed the documents served by the parliament to transform into a single collection of text in universal character coding. We also offer an easy to use interface for researchers to launch custom queries on the corpus on their own. To demonstrate the potential of the corpus, we present several analyses that give quick insights into some of the linguistic changes in Turkish and in Turkish daily life over the years.