ParlaMint: Comparable Parliamentary Corpora

The CLARIN ParlaMint project compiled comparable parliamentary corpora for a number of countries and languages.

ParlaMint corpora are interoperable, i.e. encoded to a very constrained common ParlaMint schema, a specialisation of the Parla-CLARIN recommendations, which are a customisation of the TEI Guidelines. Common scripts should process the common data in any ParlaMint corpus, despite the differing parliamentary systems of the countries, the kind of information included in the corpora, and, of course, language.

The latest version of ParlaMint is 4.1 which contains corpora for 29 countries and autonomous regions in original languages as well as machine translated to English, and is available from the CLARIN.SI repository:

• ParlaMint v4.1: "plain text", i.e. linguistically unannotated variant of the ParlaMint corpora
• ParlaMint.ana v4.1: linguistically annotated variant of the ParlaMint corpora
• ParlaMint-en.ana v4.1: machine translated and linguistically annotated ParlaMint corpora

Publications connected to ParlaMint are available at the ParlaMint project page.

The two most comprehensive publication on ParlaMint corpora are the two open access LREV papers describing versions 4.1 and 2.1:

• Tomaž Erjavec, Matyáš Kopp, Nikola Ljubešić, Taja Kuzman, Paul Rayson, Petya Osenova, Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Çağrı Çöltekin, Danijel Koržinek, Katja Meden, Jure Skubic, Peter Rupnik, Tommaso Agnoloni, José Aires, Starkaður Barkarson, Roberto Bartolini, Núria Bel, Calzada María Pérez, Roberts Darģis, Sascha Diwersy, Maria Gavriilidou, van Ruben Heusden, Mikel Iruskieta, Neeme Kahusk, Anna Kryvenko, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Carmen Magariños, Martin Mölder, Costanza Navarretta, Kiril Simov, Lars Magne Tungland, Jouni Tuominen, John Vidler, Adina Ioana Vladu, Tanja Wissik, Väinö Yrjänäinen & Darja Fišer. ParlaMint II: Advancing Comparable Parliamentary Corpora Across Europe. Language Resources & Evaluation (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s10579-024-09798-w.

• Tomaž Erjavec, Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Petya Osenova, Nikola Ljubešić, Kiril Simov, Andrej Pančur, Michał Rudolf, Matyáš Kopp, Starkaður Barkarson, Steinþór Steingrímsson, Çağrı Çöltekin, Jesse de Does, Katrien Depuydt, Tommaso Agnoloni, Giulia Venturi, María Calzada Pérez, Luciana D. de Macedo, Costanza Navarretta, Giancarlo Luxardo, Matthew Coole, Paul Rayson, Vaidas Morkevičius, Tomas Krilavičius, Roberts Darǵis, Orsolya Ring, Ruben van Heusden, Maarten Marx & Darja Fišer. The ParlaMint corpora of parliamentary proceedings. Language Resources & Evaluation 57:415–448 (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10579-021-09574-0.

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This Git repository contains the ParlaMint XML schemas, the scripts used to validate and convert the ParlaMint TEI XML corpora to some useful derived formats, and samples of the ParlaMint corpora. Note that there are several branches for different parts of the development.

• Contributing to ParlaMint repository is described in CONTRIBUTING.md file
  • git and GitHub setup
  • installing prerequisites
• Running make help in repository root folder provides make targets list with description.
• The TEI folder contains the TEI ODD, i.e. the Guidelines for encoding ParlaMint corpora, with their HTML available on [ParlaMint project pages] and the formal TEI schema specification. TEI README provides more information.
• The Schema folder contains the RelaxNG schemas for separately validating the four types of files present in the corpora. Schema README provides more information.
• The Scripts folder contains the XSLT scripts and Perl wrappers used to:
  • validate the corpora (RNG + XSLT validation for consistency);
  • convert the TEI encoded corpora to derived formats;
  • add/change common information, currently for V3.0
  • compute some statistics
• The Samples folder contains directories for a particular country or autonomous region that should include samples for all variants and formats of the ParlaMint corpora
• The Build folder contains the build environemt for a release, and all associated data. This consists of the input (source) data, scripts, and Makefile with targets to make a relese. Note the the complete corpora are too large to store on GitHub, so most data files are gitignored. However, the directory or its subdirectories contain various associated resources, e.g. the automatically produced ParlaMint root files, common taxonomies, various metadata on the corpora etc.