Using parsed and annotated corpora to analyze parliamentarians' talk in Finland

Abstract

We present a search system for grammatically analyzed corpora of Finnish parliamentary records and interviews with former parliamentarians, annotated with metadata of talk structure and involved parliamentarians, and discuss their use through carefully chosen digital humanities case studies. We first introduce the construction, contents, and principles of use of the corpora. Then we discuss the application of the search system and the corpora to study how politicians talk about power, how ideological terms are used in political

‘Democracy’ and ‘People’s Power’ in the Finnish Parliament – the Struggle between Representative, Participatory and Direct Democracy

“…These annotations allowed highly flexible searches to be performed over the dataset and, most importantly, enabled the retrieval of keywords regardless of their inflection in the text. (Andrushchenko et al 2021. ) In the analysis, we searched not only for the occurrences of demokratia and kansanvalta, but all the other words used in connection with them.…”

“…Raw data for the parliamentary debates used in this article can be downloaded from https://vode.uta.fi/data/. For more information on the dataset, see Andrushchenko et al 2021.…”

OCR Pipeline for Transforming Parliamentary Debates into Linked Data: Case ParliamentSampo - Parliament of Finland on the Semantic Web

“…It contains the speeches in a linguistically annotated form and also synchronized links to original plenary session videos [17]. The Voices of Democracy project has produced a research corpus that includes plenary minutes in 1980-2018 annotated grammatically as well as interviews of veteran MPs conducted by the PoF after 1988 [18]. The minutes of the parliamentary debates from 1991 to 2015 can also be found in the International Harvard Parlspeech Corpus [19], but we have identified gaps in the coverage in this corpus.…”