Aktualności Instytutu Podstaw Informatyki PAN

Streszczenie (autorskie):

This seminar presents our work on processing and providing access to parliamentary transcripts as part of a specialized information service for political science. Our goal is to create a unified, searchable collection of parliamentary speeches from different countries and languages, with a particular focus on making these resources accessible to researchers without extensive programming expertise.

At the center of this work is PoliCorp, a web-based platform for searching and exploring processed political texts. In contrast to initiatives such as Parla-CLARIN and related parliamentary corpora, PoliCorp emphasizes intuitive, browser-based access to the data. Its advanced search functionality allows researchers to combine or exclude criteria using logical operators and to search across multiple metadata and text fields. This makes it possible to construct targeted subcorpora and investigate complex patterns within large collections of parliamentary debates. Selected data can subsequently be downloaded in JSON format for further computational analysis.

The current collection includes transcripts from the German Bundestag and German state parliaments. We are extending the corpus to include parliamentary debates from France and Poland, moving toward a multilingual and cross-national research infrastructure.

The seminar will introduce the main stages involved in building such a resource, from preprocessing and structuring parliamentary transcripts to storing, indexing, and making them searchable on the web. We will discuss both the technical and methodological challenges of harmonizing heterogeneous parliamentary data across institutions, countries, and languages.

Finally, we will demonstrate how these corpora can support substantive research in political science and computational social science.