BasqueParl: A Bilingual Corpus of Basque Parliamentary Transcriptions

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3382–3390 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3382 BasqueParl: A Bilingual Corpus of Basque Parliamentary Transcriptions Nayla Escribano1, Jon Ander Gonz´alez1, Julen Orbegozo-Terradillos2, Ainara Larrondo-Ureta2, Sim´on Pe˜na-Fern´andez2, Olatz Perez-de-Vi˜naspre1 and Rodrigo Agerri1 1 HiTZ Center - Ixa, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU 2 Gureiker, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU {nayla.escribano, olatz.perezdevinaspre, rodrigo.agerri}@ehu.eus Abstract Parliamentary transcripts provide a valuable resource to understand the reality and know about the most important facts that occur over time in our societies. Furthermore, the political debates captured in these transcripts facilitate research on political discourse from a computational social science perspective. In this paper we release the first version of a newly compiled corpus from Basque parliamentary transcripts. The corpus is characterized by heavy Basque-Spanish code-switching, and represents an interesting resource to study political discourse in contrasting languages such as Basque and Spanish. We enrich the corpus with metadata related to relevant attributes of the speakers and speeches (language, gender, party...) and process the text to obtain named entities and lemmas. The obtained metadata is then used to perform a detailed corpus analysis which provides interesting insights about the language use of the Basque political representatives across time, parties and gender. Keywords: Parliamentary Transcripts, Code-switching, Computational Social Science, Information Extraction 1. Introduction Parliaments and chambers of public representatives are official agoras for the presentation of ideas and their dialectical confrontation, where people chosen to rep- resent certain groups interact in the public-political space. Minutes gathered in each of these agoras, which compile the aforementioned interactions in public in- stitutions, can be seen as the “black box” of a given society. In this sense, we believe that speeches from public representatives may allow us to understand and interpret the reality of a given historical moment. In this context, technological advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and other computational methods allow for parliamentary rhetoric to be analysed from a multidisciplinary per- spective. It should be observed that public institutions have always generated large amounts of textual data (debates, laws, parliamentary discourses) that have re- ceived a special interest since the start of digitization and the emergence of the Web in the last decade of the past century. Digitization of debates allows institutions to increase their public and media impact, generating at the same time valuable textual resources that can be analyzed by computational social science and NLP re- search. Specifically, relevant corpora have been gath- ered for different NLP tasks such as sentiment anal- ysis (Thomas et al., 2006; Abercrombie and Batista- Navarro, 2020) or machine translation (Roukos et al., 1995; Koehn, 2005; Hajlaoui et al., 2014). With this multidisciplinary approach in mind, we gath- ered and processed a corpus of Basque parliamentary transcriptions for public research. Furthermore, we analyzed the representatives’ speeches across different data attributes that might be of interest for the general public such as language use, gender and party. …

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