A Greek Parliament Proceedings Dataset for Computational Linguistics and Political Analysis

Konstantina Dritsa, Aikaterini Thoma, John Pavlopoulos, Panos Louridas

Keywords: dataset, Greek language, Greek Parliament, computational linguistics, semantic shift, language change, machine learning, distributional semantics

TL;DR: A Greek Parliament Proceedings Dataset for computational linguistics and political analysis

Abstract: Large, diachronic datasets of political discourse are hard to come across, especially for resource-lean languages such as Greek. In this paper, we introduce a curated dataset of the Greek Parliament Proceedings that extends chronologically from 1989 up to 2020. It consists of more than 1 million speeches with extensive meta-data, extracted from 5,355 parliamentary sitting record files. We explain how it was constructed and the challenges that had to be overcome. The dataset can be used for both computational linguistics and political analysis---ideally, combining the two. We present such an application, showing (i) how the dataset can be used to study the change of word usage through time, (ii) between significant historical events and political parties, (iii) by evaluating and employing algorithms for detecting semantic shifts.

URL: https://zenodo.org/record/7005201

Dataset Url: https://zenodo.org/record/7005201

License: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC)

Author Statement: Yes