Encoding Interruptions in Parliamentary Data: From Applause to Interjections and Laughter

Abstract

Parliamentary data, especially parliamentary discourse, is of interest to researchers from various fields in the humanities and social sciences. The growing number of machine-readable and annotated parliamentary text corpora opens up this field for computer-based quantitative analysis. In this paper I aim to give an overview of how parliamentary interruptions are recorded in official parliamentary records and how they are modeled and encoded in currently available machine-readable parliamentary corpora. Furthermore, I will discuss whether these encodings are suitable for computer-based quantitative analysis of parliamentary interruptions. I will suggest detailed encodings of parliamentary interruptions in TEI as an extension to the Parla-CLARIN recommendations, to enable the extraction of parliamentary interruptions and to facilitate computerized quantitative analysis based on these encodings. As an example, I will use the encoding of interruptions in the Austrian Parliamentary Records.

Keywords

• parliamentary data
• parliamentary records
• parliamentary interruptions
• encodings of parliamentary interruptions