Multi-aspect Multilingual and Cross-lingual Parliamentary Speech Analysis

Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide an exciting insight into elected politicians' opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Exiting research covers discussions within individual parliaments. In contrast, we apply advanced NLP methods to a joint and comparative analysis of six national parliaments (Bulgarian, Czech, French, Slovene, Spanish, and United Kingdom) between 2017 and 2020, whose transcripts are a part of the ParlaMint dataset collection. Using a uniform methodology, we analyze topics discussed, emotions, and sentiment. We assess if the age, gender, and political orientation of speakers can be detected from speeches. The results show some commonalities and many surprising differences among the analyzed countries.