BasqueParl: A Bilingual Corpus of Basque Parliamentary Transcriptions

N. Escribano, J. A. Gonzalez, J. Orbegozo-Terradillos, A. Larrondo-Ureta, S.Peña-Fernández, O. Perez-de-Viñaspre and R. Agerri (2022). BasqueParl: A Bilingual Corpus of Basque Parliamentary Transcriptions. In LREC 2022.

This repository contains BasqueParl, a bilingual corpus for political discourse analysis. It covers transcriptions from the Parliament of the Basque Autonomous Community for eight years and two legislative terms (2012-2020), and its main characteristic is the presence of Basque-Spanish code-switching speeches.

For instance, the following unprocessed speech combines a Basque text (plain) with Spanish fragments (highlighted):

Bai, zure baimenarekin hemendik.

Ba zure desioak, Guanche andrea, gureak ere badira. Harritu nau eta ez nau harritu hitza berriro hartzeak, zeren hitz egiten nengoen bitartean esan diozu albokoari le voy a contestar. Le voy a contestar, ondo iruditzen, zure eskubidean zaude, baino beno, ez dut uste inongo astakeriarik esan dudanik.

Gauzak egiten dira eta uste dut nik, nik ere eskubidea dudala Gobernuak eta beste erakundeek egiten dutena esateko. Zeren beti ver el vaso medio vacío o medio lleno, pues cambia un poco la perspectiva y vernos siempre en modo Gobierno, creo que no es nada objetivo. Se hacen cosas, se harán cosas y esta vez creo que me deberían reconocer que de la iniciativa primera a lo que hemos acordado, no nos hemos dejado nada o creo que casi nada. Entonces, bueno, sólo querı́a aclarar eso eta eskerrak berriro.

Eta ziur egon emakumea dokumentu horietan ez bada agertzen hitzetan, zeren uste dut hori ez dela garrantzitsuena, bai politiketan egongo dela eta dagoela.

Eskerrik asko.

The specificities of the BasqueParl corpus are:

14 M words of bilingual parliamentary transcriptions
Speech paragraphs as units
Metadata such as date and speaker's name, gender and party for each paragraph
Language of each paragraph (either Basque or Spanish)
Lemmas and named entities of each paragraph, with and without stopwords

Data Fields

The BasqueParl corpus is written as a Tab Separated Values (TSV) file. Each unit presents the next fields:

"date": Date corresponding to the speech, e.g. 2020-02-07
"speech_id": Number that identifies the speech within its date, e.g. 3
"text_id": Number that identifies the paragraph within its speech, e.g. 3
"speaker": Family names of the speaker, including their position if any, e.g. Tejeria Otermin LEHENDAKARIA
"birth": Year of birth of the speaker, e.g. 1971
"gender": Gender of the speaker, either E (emakumea) for female or G (gizona) for male
"party": Political group of the speaker, e.g. EAJ
"language": Language assigned to a paragraph, either eu for Basque or es for Spanish
"text": Paragraph of the speech text
"lemmas": Lemmatized paragraph
"lemmas_stw": Lemmatized paragraph without stopwords
"entities": Named entities extracted from the paragraph
"entities_stw": Named entities extracted from the paragraph without stopwords

Some fields such as gender or party may have been sometimes annotated as missing if the data was impossible to retrieve or was not appropriate.