Unfinished Business: Construction and Maintenance of a Semantically Tagged Historical Parliamentary Corpus, UK Hansard from 1803 to the present day

Matthew Coole, Paul Rayson, John Mariani


Abstract
Creating, curating and maintaining modern political corpora is becoming an ever more involved task. As interest from various social bodies and the general public in political discourse grows so too does the need to enrich such datasets with metadata and linguistic annotations. Beyond this, such corpora must be easy to browse and search for linguists, social scientists, digital humanists and the general public. We present our efforts to compile a linguistically annotated and semantically tagged version of the Hansard corpus from 1803 right up to the present day. This involves combining multiple sources of documents and transcripts. We describe our toolchain for tagging; using several existing tools that provide tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging and semantic annotations. We also provide an overview of our bespoke web-based search interface built on LexiDB. In conclusion, we examine the completed corpus by looking at four case studies including semantic categories made available by our toolchain.
Anthology ID:
2020.parlaclarin-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Darja Fišer, Maria Eskevich, Franciska de Jong
Venue:
ParlaCLARIN
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
23–27
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.parlaclarin-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthew Coole, Paul Rayson, and John Mariani. 2020. Unfinished Business: Construction and Maintenance of a Semantically Tagged Historical Parliamentary Corpus, UK Hansard from 1803 to the present day. In Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop, pages 23–27, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Unfinished Business: Construction and Maintenance of a Semantically Tagged Historical Parliamentary Corpus, UK Hansard from 1803 to the present day (Coole et al., ParlaCLARIN 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.parlaclarin-1.5.pdf