Tracking Parliament with Machine Learning: Part 3 — Introducing Parlawatch!
By: Lyndon Chan
Tags: Ai For Good, Open Government, Open Data, Cdnpoli, NLP

Tracking Parliament with Machine Learning: Part 3 — Introducing Parlawatch!

Alphabyte’s Parlawatch, now available in beta mode, automatically generates a short 3-minute summary to keep you updated with proceedings at Canada’s House of Commons Lyndon Chan Follow Dec 10, 2020 · 4 min read

Ever tried to keep updated with parliamentary proceedings in Canada but felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content? Or tried browsing your favourite news source but failed to find any mention of what happened today? If so, Alphabyte’s Parlawatch is the tool for you!

Whether you are an ordinary citizen or a political analyst/journalist, Parlawatch gives you an easily navigable interface to each day’s Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. This article will go over why it’s needed and what it is currently capable of. The tool is currently under development, so expect to see some changes in the look and feel over time, but the functionality will remain.

This article is the third of our parliamentary project series. For more information, check out our first and second articles.

Contents

Background

Methodology

Features

Don’t be a stranger

Background

Question Period is the daily 45-minute period in the Canadian House of Commons where the Members of Parliament (MPs) have the opportunity to ask policy-related questions to the government. Time is allotted according to the number of seats held by each party and questions are always answered by the Prime Minister, their Ministers, or their representatives. For opposition parliamentarians, Question Period is an opportunity to hold the government to account for their policies and ask for clarification, and for governing parliamentarians to highlight the positive contribution by their government.

Forty-five minutes per day might not seem like a lot of time to stay informed on Parliament (although sittings were far less frequent in the initial months of COVID-19). But add it up over time and it becomes a significant commitment. Missed yesterday’s sitting? Well, you now have to catch up on 90 minutes of proceedings.

The average Canadian already spends little time every day watching news broadcasting: only 24 minutes for English speakers outside of Quebec and 28 minutes for French speakers in Quebec. Consider the regular partisan attacks and delaying tactics … and you have a good idea of why Canadians need a concise, objective summary of what is happening every day.

Methodology

Fortunately, as we covered in an earlier article, the Canadian government publishes a transcribed and well-annotated digital record of what is said in parliament every day. At Alphabyte Research Lab, we scrape the day’s Question Period proceedings as soon as they are available online, apply our machine learning models in the backend, and push our summaries to our website. This way, instead of watching a 45-minute video every day, Parlawatch has you covered with a 3-minute concise summary!

At a high level, Parlawatch currently operates by:

Loading the Question Period structured transcripts Grouping the Question Period interventions into Question/Answer scenes Applying a model to summarize each Question/Answer scene Grouping the scenes by party and day Applying a second model to summarize the proceedings of each party per day

Features

So … what can you do with Parlawatch right now?

Browsing today’s daily report

With the beta, you can currently filter the proceedings summaries by Parliamentary session and day. As you might know, the Parliament of Canada sits in discrete sessions which usually begin after an election or a cabinet shuffle and end with a prorogation or another election.

Exploring daily reports from historic parliamentary sessions and sittings

Another feature we have is sharing to social media. If you would like to publicize or comment on the day’s proceedings with your friends and family, we have integrated sharing to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Sharing the latest Parlawatch report with friends on social media

Don’t be a stranger

This is just the beta of Parlawatch and we have plenty of updates lined up (with beautiful visualizations, and in-depth text analysis) so stay tuned for the next release.

If you are a journalist or political analyst interested in using this tool, or an engineer or researcher interested in helping us improve/build up Parlawatch, feel free to reach out to us by LinkedIn or email (contact@alphabytesolutions.com)!