ParlaMint project

Project factsheet

Project description

National parliamentary data is a verified communication channel between the elected political representatives and society members in any democracy. It needs to be made accessible and comprehensive - especially in times of a global crisis. With the recent advances of artificial intelligence, analytics over unstructured parliamentary data is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for reliable and trustworthy approaches in checking the veracity of information in contemporary society.

One of the most important aspects of processing of new parliamentary data is its direct correspondence to the most recent events with global impact on human health, social life and economics such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. By comparing the data synchronically and diachronically within a cross-lingual context, the scientific and civil communities will be able to track pan-European discussion and be quickly updated on any emerging topic.

Our goal is to provide resources and tools for focused observations on trends, opinions, decisions on lockdowns and restrictive measures as well as on the consequences with respect to health, medical care systems, employment, etc. in times of emergencies. In our case this emergency is the COVID-19 pandemic. However, our methodology will be scalable to other events, such as economic crises, etc. Thus, our main aims are:

• to compile a collection of parliamentary datasets (corpora) in a number of languages and in a harmonized format, covering both the current data and older, reference data,
• to process the corpora linguistically,
• to index the data with popular concordancers so that interested parties can search and extract the relevant comparable information,
• to show through appropriate use cases that our resources and technology serves the society's needs.