A preliminary release of the Italian Parliamentary Corpus
Authors: Valentino Frasnelli, Alessio Palmero Aprosio (Università di Trento, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, 2023)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
Political debates have been used for years in political and social studies on languages and their cultures. In this paper, we release a preliminary version of the Italian Parliamentary Corpus, a dataset containing 1.2 billion words that includes the political debates in the Italian Parliament from 1848 to 2018. The data has been collected applying an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to the original documents, available in PDF format on the websites of Camera dei Deputati and Senato della Repubblica.

Introduction
The analysis of parliamentary debates is very important from many research perspectives. Apart from political science, this kind of data can be used to understand how a language and its culture evolves in history. In particular, in the last two centuries the Italian society has changed under a lot of points of view. Since the transition from the absolute monarchy to the parliamentary monarchy, that took place in 1848, Italy went through historical events such as two world wars, the fascist dictatorship, the exile of the royal family, the universal suffrage, the accession to the European Union, and much more. Such important milestones, along with all the rest of the Italian political and social life, are traced in the parliamentary reports. Most research groups around the world have already collected and released corpora of political debates in various languages, used in diversified fields, such as religion [1] and gender [2] studies, multilinguality [3], and so on. GerParCor [4] is a dataset containing the German-language parliamentary protocols from three centuries and four countries. Similarly, siParl [5], DutchParl [6], and the Polish Parliamentary Corpus [7] are collections of political debates, in Slovenian, Dutch, and Polish languages respectively. In addition, since the creation of the European Union, political debates of the European Parliament have been made available in multiple languages, becoming a precious resource for machine translation [8]. In this paper, we present the preliminary version of the Italian Parliamentary Corpus, a collection of documents covering 200 years and containing all the documents redacted by the two houses of the bicameral Italian Parliament (Camera dei Deputati, the lower house, and Senato della Repubblica, previously Senato del Regno, the upper house). The rest of this article is structured as follows. In Section 2 we describe how the raw data has been collected. Section 3 shows the steps performed to get the clean texts. Section 4 contains some statistics of the dataset. Finally, both the source code and the dataset are available for download, as described in Section 5.

Conclusion
In this paper we describe a preliminary version of the Italian Parliamentary Corpus, containing the Italian Parliament debates since 1848. In total, around 1.2 billion words have been collected. In the future, we will further investigate OCR postcorrection solutions to get cleaner data. We will also complete the data collection, by downloading and processing attachments to the parliamentary sessions, bulletins, law proposals, and reports of the Standing Committees, already available on the Italian Parliament houses websites. We are also planning to assign each speech to the corresponding politician, and release the dataset so that anyone can use the tagging to make comparative and social studies.