A Corpus of Spanish Political Speeches from 1937 to 2019

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 928–932 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 928 A Corpus of Spanish Political Speeches from 1937 to 2019 Elena Álvarez-Mellado Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University 415 South St, Waltham, MA 02453 ealvarezmellado@brandeis.edu Abstract This paper documents a corpus of political speeches in European Spanish. The documents in the corpus belong to the Christmas speeches that have been delivered yearly by the head of state of Spain since 1937. The historical period covered by these speeches ranges from the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship up until today. As a result, the corpus reflects some of the most significant events and political changes in the recent history of Spain. Up until now, the speeches as a whole had not been collected into a single, systematic and reusable resource, as most of the texts were scattered among different sources. The paper describes: (1) the composition of the corpus; (2) the Python interface that facilitates querying and analyzing the corpus using the NLTK and spaCy libraries and (3) a set of HTML visualizations aimed at the general public to navigate the corpus and explore differences between TF-IDF frequencies. Keywords: Political Speech Corpus, Corpus Visualization, TF-IDF frequency 1. Introduction and Previous Work Political speeches attract a lot of attention, both among specialists and the general public. Due to their historical and cultural significance, political speeches are subject of study in political communication, sociological studies and discourse analysis. Their availability also make political speeches a very informative piece of linguistic data to inform language use. As a result, political speech transcriptions have been widely exploited as corpus material for very di- verse endeavours (Ahrens, 2006; Bevitori, 2015; Charteris- Black, 2004; Laver et al., 2003; Light, 2014; Savoy, 2010; Sim et al., 2013). The Presidential Inaugural Addresses Corpus from the NLTK toolkit (Bird et al., 2009) (that compiles the inau- gural speeches by the US presidents from 1789 to 2009) is a good example of an English corpus of political speeches that has been broadly used for educational, sociological and linguistic purposes. Efforts are being made to produce dig- itized and reusable corpora of political speeches in other languages other than English (Barbaresi, 2018; Osenova and Simov, 2012). This paper introduces a new corpus of political speeches in Spanish that range from 1937 to 2019. The collected texts are all Christmas Eve National Speeches, a speech that is given every year by the king of Spain where he shortly addresses some of the public issues that affect the country. This tradition began in 1937, when fascist dictator Francisco Franco addressed the nation on New Year’s Eve. The Christmas speech was celebrated yearly1 during the following 40 years of Franco’s regime and the tradition was preserved by the following heads of state after Franco’s death in 1975 and continues up to this day. This collection of speeches is an interesting piece of both linguistic data …

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