The Parliamentary Code-Switching Corpus: Bilingualism in the U krainian Parliament in the 1990s-2020s (2023)

Abstract: We describe a Ukrainian-Russian code-switching corpus of Ukrainian Parliamentary Session Transcripts. The corpus includes speeches entirely in Ukrainian, Russian, or various types of mixed speech and allows us to see how speakers switch between these languages depending on the communicative situation. The paper describes the process of creating this corpus from the official multilingual transcripts using automatic language detecting and publicly available metadata on the speakers. On this basis, we consider possible reasons for the change in the number of Ukrainian speakers in the parliament and present the most common patterns of bilingual Ukrainian and Russian code-switching in parliamentarians’ speeches.

## introduction as a result of ukraine's long history of political dependence on russia, first as part of the empire, then throughout its soviet history, a significant number of people in ukraine are bilingual in ukrainian and russian. since ukraine's independence @xcite , the share of the use of the ukrainian language in society has gradually increased and the share of russian has decreased; the war of 2022 has significantly accelerated this process @xcite . in the 20th century, the issue of ukrainian-russian bilingualism was the subject of many studies by ukrainian linguists with a focus on deviations from russian normative use and interference from ukrainian. in the 21st century, the focus was mainly on sociolinguistic studies concerning the distribution of both languages and the tasks of supporting the ukrainian language and pushing back stigmatized mixed ukrainian-russian speech known as surzhyk. the main research methods applied to ukrainian-russian bilingualism were interviews and questionnaires, as well as analysis of individual texts, dictionaries, and normative sources. corpus-based studies of ukrainian-russian bilingualism have not yet become widespread. an exception is the oldenburg surzhyk corpus, which consists of mixed speech recordings made by researchers in different regions of ukraine, and the studies based on it that examine the distribution of different variants within mixed ukrainian-russian speech depending on the region and the characteristics of speakers @xcite . creating a corpus is a promising method of studying code-switching, as it allows us to see code-switching in a broader linguistic context and quantify language use. dedicated corpora of code-switching have been created for english and hindi @xcite , english and welsh @xcite , german and turkish @xcite , @xcite , and many more. this study aims to create a corpus of ukrainian-russian code-switching based on transcripts of ukrainian parliamentary sessions. these transcripts include not only parliamentary speeches, but also discussions between the speakers. this presents a rich bilingual discourse with speakers using ukrainian, russian, or different kinds of mixed speech and switching between these languages depending on the communicative situation. this corpus will allow us to improve our understanding of common switching patterns found in ukrainian parliamentary speeches. the remainder of this paper is organized as fol-lows: section 2 discusses related work. specifically existing code-switching corpora, their features, and research related to these corpora, and presents a selection of the most important recent work in this domain. in section 3 we present the code-switching corpus of ukrainian parliamentary session transcripts and go into detail describing the main features of this corpus. the pre-processing, normalization, and processing steps during corpus compilation are given in section 4. here, we present the results of the separation of transcript into speakers and language identification. in section 5, we present an analysis of the transcripts regarding the speaker's language, as it relates to normative documents and political events, showing possible reasons affecting the use of ukrainian in parliament. here we also present some typical cases of code-switching. the last section 6 finalizes the paper and suggests some future works and improvements. ## related work over the past few years, research in the field of code-switching corpora has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers. figure 1 shows the number of publications related to code-switching corpora in the scopus database with overall dynamics increasing every year. a lot of research is devoted to corpora with audio tracks, and these corpora are used to improve the quality of speech recognition with mixed corpora. modipa and davel (2022) present two reference corpora for the analysis of sepedi-english code-switched speech in the context of automatic speech recognition. @xcite describe the collection of a hinglish (hindi-english) code-switching database at the indian institute of technology guwahati (iitg) which is referred to as the iitg-hingcos corpus. @xcite introduce the south east asia mandarin-english corpus, a 63-h spontaneous mandarin-english code-switching transcribed speech corpus suitable for lvcsr and language change detection/identification research. the corpus consists of recordings of unscripted interviews and free conversations by 157 singaporean and malaysian speakers who speak a mixture of mandarin and english switching within sentences. some researchers consider code-switching corpora from the point of view of psycholinguistics and investigate the reasons for switching from one language to another. @xcite show that code-switching does not always involve additional effort and resources. @xcite presents the differentiation of code-switching from borrowing, the methods for evaluating competing models of grammaticality in code-switching, and the importance of studying variables as well as uniform patterns in code-switching. thus, researchers use code-switching corpora for various tasks, investigating different aspects from speech recognition to psycholinguistic reasons for switching between languages. in our work, we study a code-switching corpus of parliamentary speech. several such codeswitching corpora based on parliamentary texts already exist, including the bilingual dutch-french speeches from the belgium federal texts @xcite and the bilingual corpus of basque parliamentary transcriptions @xcite . the dutchparl corpus (the parliamentary documents in dutch) contains the belgian federal documents, bilingual french-dutch texts which are presented in the original french or dutch and contain an aligned translation in the second language. the basqueparl corpus contains only original bilingual transcripts in basque and spanish and represents the bilingual discourse of the basque parliament. it is designed for the automatic analysis of political discourse, including the use of languages and their correlation with entities. basqueparl shows that there has been no significant change in the amount of bilingualism in parliament over the period 2012-2020, which is covered by the corpus @xcite . a specific feature of the ukrainian corpus of parliamentary transcripts from 1990-2020 is that the proportions and use of the two languages in it change noticeably and unevenly over the years, gradually reaching 100% ukrainian in the second half of the 2010s. the language policy in the ukrainian parliament has been a hot political issue for all these years, and the actual use of languages has varied depending on the political situation. the corpus shows the history of the existence and decline of postcolonial bilingualism in parliamentary discourse. ## corpus description the corpus of the verkhovna rada (the ukrainian unicameral parliament) proceedings contains texts recorded from 1990 until 2020, downloaded from the official website of the verkhovna rada foot_0 . the timespan starts even before ukrainian independence when verkhovna rada was an institution of a soviet republic. the size of the initial data is about 70 million tokens. a specific feature of the corpus is that it represents a bilingual ukrainian-russian discourse with different shares of ukrainian, russian, and bilingual speech in different years. the ukrainian language prevails in the corpus, and its share was increasing over the years: from a minimum of 76% in 1995 to 100% in 2018-2020. the parliamentary speeches and remarks are recorded literally, in the language actually spoken, and language mixing is also accurately reproduced in the transcript. this accuracy allows us to analyze the use of a particular language in dialog and its correlation with other interlocutors' language and the session's topic. the corpus consists of text files ("txt" format), organized by speaker, that is, text files that contain all the utterances of each member of parliament for the year made both in speeches and in the discussion; this is not unlike the hansard website of british parliamentary discussions. this form allows us to analyze the use of ukrainian and russian by each speaker. the corpus is being annotated by age and the political party of a given speaker, as well as by the administrative region of ukraine (or by another country if applicable) where they were born and educated. ## corpus preparation the transcript of parliamentary sessions is a single file that contains all parliamentary sessions for the whole year. an example excerpt from the 2013 transcript is given in appendix a. from this fragment, it can be seen that the speakers are written in capital letters with initials. sometimes this is the name and middle name, i.e. two initials, and sometimes only one initial, only the name is given. at the beginning of each session, the chairman or head is announced who is in charge of the meeting, and further in the text he is referred to merely as "holovuju čyj" (presiding). also, the text may contain timestamps (16:11:06), quotations (for example, ". . . in accordance with article 13 of the law of ukraine "on the status of people's deputy of ukraine..."), and remarks (for example, "splashes", "noise in the hall"). ## conclusions and future plans in this paper, we present the ukrainian-russian code-switching corpus of ukrainian parliamentary session transcripts (1990-2020), its composition, annotation, and research possibilities. the language markup in the corpus is carried out at the sentence level. the corpus represents bilingual ukrainian-russian parliamentary discourse, which has been changing over the years and became monolingual ukrainian in the second half of the 2010s. we tried to analyze whether laws and the general political situation affect the actual use of languages in the council. it turned out that laws are a deterrent to increasing the use of the russian language in parliament. in some cases, the influence of political trends on the use of languages can be assumed (for example, 2007, when the increase in the share of the russian language coincided with the pro-russian campaign in ukraine), but this requires additional research. in the future, we plan to process the entire corpus of parliamentary transcripts for 1990-2020 and consistently trace the manifestations of ukrainian-russian bilingualism over 30 years and the history of its fading. we found some typical cases of bilingual speeches on the material of 2003 texts, and we want to look for similar cases automatically and trace the trends of different cases (language mixing and language switching) in the rada over the years. in the future, additional corpus labeling is planned, such as part of speech, and entities will make it possible to identify additional connections between speakers. it would be interesting also to apply thematic modeling and trace the correlation between the discussion of the language issue in parliament and the actual use of languages. besides, in the future, it is planned to connect the interface and change the corpus storage format in order to store dialog information and all the necessary metadata.