A corpus of German political speeches from the 21st century

A corpus of German political speeches from the 21st century Adrien Barbaresi Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences J¨agerstr. 22/23 – 10117 Berlin – Germany barbaresi@bbaw.de Abstract The present German political speeches corpus follows from a initial release which has been used in various research contexts. This article documents an updated and extended version: as 2017 marks the end of a legislative period, the corpus now includes the four highest ranked functions on federal state level. Besides providing a citable reference for this resource, the main contributions are (1) an extensive description of the corpus to be released and (2) the description of an interface to navigate through the texts, designed for researchers beyond the corpus and computational linguistics communities as well as for the general public. The corpus can be considered to be from the 21st century since most speeches have been written after 2001 and also because it includes a visualiza- tion interface providing synoptic overviews ordered chronologically, by speaker or by keyword as well as consequent accesses to the texts. Keywords: Web corpus construction, Visualization, Keyword extraction 1. Introduction 1.1. Context In the Western world, political speeches held by state repre- sentatives are often the focus of people’s attention and they are endowed with a high symbolical value. Words, themes and phraseology found in speeches are likely to be found in a wide array of other texts as speeches either give an im- pulse or entail a reaction to events or trends. Speech writing as a genre follows a series of rhetorical rules which make it distinct from other written texts, while the reading in front of an audience also shapes their style toward proper speech. First and foremost, it is necessary to discriminate between political speeches and speeches held by religious digni- taries or other kinds of public addresses. Another distinc- tion can be made between electoral speeches and speeches made by politicians vested with a state function. From a lin- guistic standpoint, a further difference regards the flow of the speech, as there are speeches which are meant to be read without interruption and others which may not be delivered as fluently, for example in a parliament address with im- mediate reactions. Finally, there are genres marginally re- lated to speeches such as press conferences and interviews. From a political standpoint, there are qualitative differences as some speeches are part of the daily routine of state bod- ies whereas others are considered to be important because of a particular political situation or institutional relevance, for example after a new government has taken office. A major goal of speech collections is to gather informa- tion on government work, since political texts are the con- crete by-product of strategic political activity and have a widely recognized potential to reveal important informa- tion about the policy positions of their authors (Laver et al., 2003). Linguists are also particularly interested in building corpora and improving coverage for this particular genre, while its versatility paves the way towards the use as cor- …

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