Pártélet: A Hungarian Corpus of Propaganda Texts from the Hungarian Socialist Era

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2381–2388 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2381 P´art´elet: A Hungarian Corpus of Propaganda Texts from the Hungarian Socialist Era Zolt´an Kmetty1, Veronika Vincze2, Dorottya Demszky3, Orsolya Ring1, Bal´azs Nagy4, Martina Katalin Szab´o1,4 1 Centre for Social Sciences, CSS-RECENS 1097, Budapest, T´oth K´alm´an street 4, Hungary 2 MTA-SZTE Research Group on Artificial Intelligence 6720 Szeged, Tisza Lajos krt. 103., Hungary 3 Stanford University, Linguistics Department 450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305 4 University of Szeged, Institute of Informatics 6720 Szeged, Dugonics t´er 13., Hungary kmetty.Zoltan@tk.mta.hu, vinczev@inf.u-szeged.hu, ddemszky@stanford.edu ring.Orsolya@tk.mta.hu, bnagy@inf.u-szeged.hu, martina@inf.u-szeged.hu Abstract In this paper, we present P´art´elet, a digitized Hungarian corpus of Communist propaganda texts. P´art´elet was the official journal of the governing party during the Hungarian socialism from 1956 to 1989, hence it represents the direct political agitation and propaganda of the dictatorial system in question. The paper has a dual purpose: first, to present a general review of the corpus compilation process and the basic statistical data of the corpus, and second, to demonstrate through two case studies what the dataset can be used for. We show that our corpus provides a unique opportunity for conducting research on Hungarian propaganda discourse, as well as analyzing changes of this discourse over a 35-year period of time with computer-assisted methods. Keywords: historical corpus, propaganda, communism, Hungarian language, discourse analysis, computational history, conputa- tional semantics 1. Introduction The active and decisive period of Hungarian history from 1956 to 1989 (also referred to as the K´ad´ar era after the eponymous General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party) is a widely examined topic in sociology, social history, political history, and history in a broader sense. At the same time, most of the studies used traditional methods for analyzing these phenomena (Szab´o, 2007; Pap, 2017; Gy´ani, 2016). Until now, the biggest barrier for the analysis of a huge amount of textual data with NLP methods was the lack of a reasonably-sized digitized corpus. We address this issue by compiling a large Hungarian database that contains all the articles of the P´art´elet (literal translation: “life of the party”) journal, which was published from 1956 to 1989. In this paper, we present P´art´elet, a digitized Hungarian corpus of Communist propaganda texts. P´art´elet (1956– 1989) was the official journal of the Central Leadership of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Hence it repre- sents not just the media discourse of the era, but also the official discourse of the government. The structure of our dataset provides a unique opportunity for the corpus-based examination of the temporal dynamics of several elements of the political discourse of the given era. In addition, since digitized corpora of propaganda texts written in Hungarian have not been compiled so far, it also enables the corpus- based examination of manipulative language use. Out- comes of the detailed analysis of propaganda techniques, for instance, can be potentially useful for propaganda de- tection in …

Content truncated to 500 words