Work Package 5 - Parliamentary, government and legal texts
WP5 on “Parliamentary, government and legal texts” covers parliaments in Europe at the national and supranational level. It aims to provide a pilot infrastructure for the collection, harmonization, publication, and analysis of textual data related to parliamentary speeches as well as legislation, bills, amendments and laws. The work package pursues four objectives:
1. Creating an inventory of parliamentary texts
The first objective is to take stock of available parliamentary text sources in an inventory. Multiple parliamentary speech and legislation corpora exist that have been generated by individual research teams in separate projects. To realize the research potential that lies in these text corpora, the WP will create and publish an inventory of available parliamentary text corpora on speeches and legislation in Europe.
2. Integrated database of parliamentary speeches and legislation
The work package will provide a demonstration of how an integrated database of parliamentary speeches and legislation at national and EU level can be set up. This pilot database, entitled ParlLawSpeech, will focus on creating links between parliamentary speeches and legislative texts.
3. A better infrastructure for scientific research on parliaments
Access to parliamentary speech and documentary data remains difficult for researchers engaging in comparative research, as parliaments use different data access strategies. The work package will engage in active exchange with relevant officials in parliaments as well as data scientists to achieve mutually beneficial data access opportunities.
4. Enhancing data access
The work package will publish the pilot database ParlLawSpeech as an open source data set. In addition to providing a database ready for scientific analysis, the work package will provide training modules, tutorials, and a test framework of a generic API as well as an interactive website facilitating public access to systematic information from parliamentary text data.