German Parliamentary Corpus (GerParCor)

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 1900–1906 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 1900 German Parliamentary Corpus (GERPARCOR) Giuseppe Abrami, Mevl¨ut Bagci, Leon Hammerla, Alexander Mehler Goethe University Frankfurt Robert-Mayer-Straße 10, 60325 Frankfurt am Main {abrami, bagci, mehler}@em.uni-frankfurt.de, hammerla@stud.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract Parliamentary debates represent a large and partly unexploited treasure trove of publicly accessible texts. In the German- speaking area, there is a certain deficit of uniformly accessible and annotated corpora covering all German-speaking parliaments at the national and federal level. To address this gap, we introduce the German Parliamentary Corpus (GERPARCOR). GER- PARCOR is a genre-specific corpus of (predominantly historical) German-language parliamentary protocols from three centuries and four countries, including state and federal level data. In addition, GERPARCOR contains conversions of scanned protocols and, in particular, of protocols in Fraktur converted via an OCR process based on TESSERACT. All protocols were preprocessed by means of the NLP pipeline of spaCy3 and automatically annotated with metadata regarding their session date. GERPARCOR is made available in the XMI format of the UIMA project. In this way, GERPARCOR can be used as a large corpus of historical texts in the field of political communication for various tasks in NLP. Keywords: Parliament, German, Corpus, UIMA 1. Introduction The creation of language resources that are fully an- notated in an optimal way is a major issue which consumes a lot of time and effort. Nevertheless, in the current era, with increasing digitization and open access strategies, new treasures of corpora can be unearthed. This includes parliamentary documents, which are available in various types: • Plenary protocols: Plenary protocols are steno- graphic documentations of the plenary session, in- cluding speeches, comments and other contribu- tions such as applause. In the plenary protocols there are references to printed matters which are being debated. • Printed matter: All processes which are dealt with in a parliament are referred to as printed mat- ter. These can be draft bills, proposals, reports or questions. – Minor Questions: Members of a parliament may ask their government Minor Questions, which the government must answer and pub- lish in a timely manner. – Major Question: In addition, Members of Parliament can use a Major Question to re- quest information and clarification from the government on political issues and facts. At least in the German Bundestag, the govern- ment’s answer can be discussed publicly in the plenary session. • Committee protocols: Most parliaments dis- cuss issues beforehand in individual committees, which then (among other things) prepare propos- als for the plenum. These meetings are usually open to the public and are also minuted. Currently, the latter documents are not yet fully avail- able, which has several reasons: many of them are not accessible via a direct path (API), only as scanned im- ages, or not available at all because they have not been digitized. Since not all of the above-mentioned types of documents are equally available from all German- speaking …

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