Romania ranks almost last in Europe when it comes to gender equality in political representation, with about 10% fewer women in politics than the E.U. average. We proceed from the assumption that this underrepresentation is also influenced by the sexism and verbal abuse female politicians face in the public sphere, especially in online media. We collect a novel dataset with sexist comments in Romanian language from newspaper articles about Romanian female politicians and propose baseline models using classical machine learning models and fine-tuned pretrained transformer models for the classification of sexist language in the online medium.

The present paper aims to describe the collection of ParlaMint-RO corpus and to analyse several trends in parliamentary debates (plenary sessions of the Lower House) held in between 2000 and 2020). After a short description of the data collection (of existing transcripts), the workflow of data processing (text extraction, conversion, encoding, linguistic annotation), and an overview of the corpus, the paper will move on to a multi-layered linguistic analysis to validate interdisciplinary perspectives. We use computational methods and corpus linguistics approaches to scrutinize the future tense forms used by Romanian speakers, in order to create a data-supported profile of the parliamentary group strategies and planning.