In this paper we describe an experiment for the application of text clustering techniques to dossiers of amendments to proposed legislation discussed in the Italian Senate. The aim is to assist the Senate staff in the detection of groups of amendments similar in their textual formulation in order to schedule their simultaneous voting. Experiments show that the exploitation (extraction, annotation and normalization) of domain features is crucial to improve the clustering performance in many problematic cases not properly dealt with by standard approaches. The similarity engine was implemented and integrated as an experimental feature in the internal application used for the management of amendments in the Senate Assembly and Committees. Thanks to the Open Data strategy pursued by the Senate for several years, all documents and data produced by the institution are publicly available for reuse in open formats.

This paper describes the process of acquisition, cleaning, interpretation, coding and linguistic annotation of a collection of parliamentary debates from the Senate of the Italian Republic covering the COVID-19 period and a former period for reference and comparison according to the CLARIN ParlaMint guidelines and prescriptions. The corpus contains 1199 sessions and 79,373 speeches, for a total of about 31 million words and was encoded according to the ParlaCLARIN TEI XML format, as well as in CoNLL-UD format. It includes extensive metadata about the speakers, the sessions, the political parties and Parliamentary groups. As required by the ParlaMint initiative, the corpus was also linguistically annotated for sentences, tokens, POS tags, lemmas and dependency syntax according to the universal dependencies guidelines. Named entity classification was also included. All linguistic annotation was performed automatically using state-of-the-art NLP technology with no manual revision. The Italian dataset is freely available as part of the larger ParlaMint 2.1 corpus deposited and archived in CLARIN repository together with all other national corpora. It is also available for direct analysis and inspection via various CLARIN services and has already been used both for research and educational purposes.