Adding political orientation metadata to ParlaMint corpora

Abstract

Parliamentary debates are an important source for political discourse research as well as research in other disciplines. The ParlaMint project aims to create comparable corpora of parliamentary debates which, through unified encoding, provide a comprehensible resource to support such research. Within these corpora, speeches are attributed to speakers, and speaker metadata, including temporal affiliations with different organizations such as parliamentary groups and political parties. This paper discusses the addition of metadata on the political orientation of parties and parliamentary groups to the ParlaMint corpora. The paper explains our two sources for this information, namely the Chapel Hill Expert Survey Dataset and Wikipedia, the process of data collection and its subsequent encoding in the corpora. Furthermore, the paper presents an analysis of the extent of the added metadata, along with an example of exploratory data analysis. It also outlines the distribution of utterances across political orientation categories within ParlaMint, offering a comprehensive overview of the diverse perspectives and ideologies within the corpora. The inclusion of this supplementary metadata could prove valuable for parliamentary data research, while the methodology developed could be used to add further metadata to the ParlaMint corpora.