Corpus of Parliamentary Questions in the Hellenic Parliament

This corpus of parliamentary questions, or simply questions, is the first Greek open corpus-based on written questions submitted between the 13th and the 17th parliamentary periods.  It contains 2,000 representative questions from four parliamentary periods that span over a politically turbulent decade for Greece (2009-2019). This period included, among others, the handling and the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis and the -still ongoing- refugee/migrant crisis.

This corpus has been developed through the crowdsourcing initiative of the Hellenic OCR Team and is part of a more extensive effort to fully digitize the archives of the Hellenic Parliament for creating open data that can foster research in Greece’s modern political history.

It contains 638,865 tokens (43,025 types), which are distributed per Parliamentary period as follows: ΙΓ’ (13th) Period: 121,103 tokens (16,238 types), IE’ (15th) Period: 173,741 tokens (21,378 types), ΙΣΤ’ (16th) Period: 181,147 tokens (21,668 types), IZ’ (17th) Period: 162,874 tokens (21,409 types).

For each text file in the corpus that corresponds to a single written question, there is a rich set of metadata that have been recorded and stored in an external database in csv format. The metadata included are:

• Protocol Number: local registry number to identify a question during a specific period.
• Date:     Date of the original submission.
• Type:     Nature of parliamentary control. Here means “questions” or “question combined with an application for submission of documents.”
• Subject: Topic of the question as indicated by the submitter(s), that is the MP(s).            
• Link:      Link to question matrix in the parliamentary portal.
• Session/Period: The parliamentary session and period a question was submitted.
• Party:    Parliamentary group, the submitter(s) belong to.
• Date Last Modified: Date of modification, if any.       
• Submitter: Name(s) of the MP(s) who submitted the question.
• Ministries: The Ministry(ies) the question is addressed to.            
• Ministers: The Ministrer(s) the question is addressed to.            
• Question File: Link to the original PDF question file.
• Answer Files: Link(s) to the PDF answer file(s).   
• link serialNr: universal registry number to uniquely identify a question; it allows linkage with the textual data as it matches the name of the respective txt file.