Affiliations: [a] ICAM – Advanced Environmental Research Institute, Unversity of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania | [b] Department of English and German Studies, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain | [c] Faculty of Slavic Studies, Sofia University St. Kl. Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria | [d] Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria | [e] Department of English and German Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Zaragoza, Teruel, Spain | [f] Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Kristian Miok, ICAM – Advanced Environmental Research Institute, Unversity of Timisoara, Romania. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide an informative insight into elected politicians’ opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) research. While exiting research studied individual parliaments, we apply advanced NLP methods to a joint and comparative analysis of six national parliaments (Bulgarian, Czech, French, Slovene, Spanish, and United Kingdom) between 2017 and 2020. We analyze emotions and sentiment in the transcripts from the ParlaMint dataset collection, and assess if the age, gender, and political orientation of speakers can be detected from their speeches. The results show some commonalities and many surprising differences among the analyzed countries.
Keywords: Parliamentary debates, natural language processing, deep learning, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, metadata prediction, ParlaMint corpora, cross-lingual analysis
