KB Lab team member Dr Martijn Kleppe will be presenting at the CLARIN-PLUS Workshop "Working with Parliamentary Records" on 27-29 March 2016 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Goals of the workshop
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 a lot of 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.
The workshop aims to discover the ways, in which the NLP technology, developed within CLARIN, would help for curating parliament records and for answering research questions in the field of Digital Humanities. 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 is the third in a series of four as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project and 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.
Topics and perspectives
Perspective of curators and researchers:
- Historical perspective: the specifics of diachronical perspective; time dynamics per topics, etc.
- Political science perspective: political activity of parties and politicians; the role of the various public political bodies; policy comparison; language differences as indicators to differing political views etc.
- Sociological perspective: conflicts in parliament; attitudes of politicians to critical issue: trending topics; patterns of language use reflecting societal dynamics, models of parliamentary communication, control, commissions, etc.
- Psychological and language perspective: language portraits of politicians; semantic differences of political terms; gestures; behavior in parliament, etc.
Developers' perspective:
- Design of parliamentary speech corpora: annotations, visualization, etc.
- Text analytics, semantic processing and linking of parliamentary data
- Searches and information extraction from parliamentary corpora
- Multilinguality issues in parliamentary data
Practical details
Date workshop: 27-29 March 2017
Venue: City Hotel, Sofia (http://sofiacityhotel.com/en/)
Host: IICT, Sofia, Bulgaria
Preliminary schedule
1st day (half day):
14.00-14.15 welcome
14.15-14.30 introduction to CLARIN support for research based on of parliamentary data
14.30-15.30 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 1: Linking Parliamentary Data: an event perspective by Laura Hollink (CWI, The Netherlands)
15.30-16.00 coffee break
16.00-17.20 presentations by participants: 10 min (6-8 max)
17:15-18:00 discussion on obstacles, gaps, requirements
2nd day (full day)
09.00-10.00 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 2 by Andreas Blätte (University of Duisburg, Germany)
10.00-10.30 coffee break
10.30-12.00 hands-on session 1
12.00-13:30 lunch
13:30-15.30 focus group
15.30-16.00 coffee break
16:00-17:00 presentations/ demonstrations by participants: 10 min (6 max)
17.00-18.00 moderated discussion
3rd day (half day)
09.00-11.00 hands-on sessions 2
11.00-11.30 coffee break
11.30-12.30 workshop findings, agenda for the next steps