ParlaCLARIN II: LREC2020 workshop on creating, using and linking parliamentary corpora with other types of political discourse

Parliamentary data is a major source of socially relevant content. It is available in ever larger quantities, is multilingual, accompanied by rich metadata, and has the distinguishing characteristic that it is spoken language produced in controlled circumstances which has traditionally been transcribed but is now increasingly released also in audio and video formats. All these factors require solutions related to structuring, synchronization, visualization, querying and analysis of parliamentary corpora. Furthermore, approaches to the exploitation of parliamentary corpora to their full extent also have to take into account the needs of researchers from vastly different Humanities and Social Sciences fields, such as political sciences, sociology, history, and psychology.

An inspiring and highly successful first edition of the ParlaCLARIN scientific workshop held at LREC 2018 and a follow-up developmental ParlaFormat workshop held at CLARIN ERIC in 2019 resulted in a comprehensive overview of a multitude of the existing parliamentary resources worldwide as well as tangible first steps towards better harmonization, interoperability and comparability of the resources and tools relevant for the study of parliamentary discussions and decisions.

The second ParlaCLARIN workshop therefore aims to bring together developers, curators and researchers of regional, national and international parliamentary debates that are suitable for research in disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We invite unpublished original work focusing on the compilation, annotation, visualisation and utilisation of parliamentary records as well as linking or comparing parliamentary records with other datasets of political discourse such as party manifestos, political speeches, political campaign debates, social media posts, etc. Apart from dissemination of the results, the workshop also aims to address the identified obstacles, discuss open issues and coordinate future efforts in this increasingly trans-national and cross-disciplinary community.