This document summarizes the Talk of Europe project which links proceedings from the European Parliament from 1996 to the present. The primary goals are to represent the data in RDF format, publish it as linked open data, and promote applications that make use of the data. The project has enriched the data by linking it to databases about MEPs, their political backgrounds, and categorizing debates by topic. They are holding a creative camp to bring together developers and researchers to invent new uses for the dataset using natural language processing and other techniques.

1. Talk of Europe
Linking European Parliament Proceedings
Astrid van Aggelen - VU University Amsterdam
Max Kemman (@MaxJ_K) - Erasmus University Rotterdam

2. About the project
● Astrid van Aggelen
● Laura Hollink
● Max Kemman
● Martijn Kleppe
● Henri Beunders
● Marnix van Berchum
● Johan Oomen
● Jaap Blom
● Steven Krauwer
● Jan Odijk
● 2014-2015
● Funded by CLARIN-NL & CLARIN
ERIC

3. Primary goals
plenary sessions 1996 - (present)
● Represent in Resource Description
Framework

4. Primary goals
plenary sessions 1996 - (present)
● Publish as linked open data

5. Primary goals
plenary sessions 1996 - (present)
● Promote
applications

6. The European Parliament
session
sessionDay
agendaItem
speech

7. The European Parliament
Plenary sessions are NOT
● strictly role-based
● mirror of law-making
● interactive

8. Datasets
1. Europarl debate registry
date, debates, speakers, speeches
who said what in which debate on which day?

9. Data model

10. Data model

11. Enriching the data (1)
?
What is a member’s political
background?

12. Datasets
● Europarl debate registry
debates, speakers, speeches
● Europarl MEP database
parties, committee, country, delegation

13. Data model

14. Data model

15. Data model

16. Enriching the data (2)
How to categorise debates?
?

17. Enriching the data (2)
● Foreign Affairs
● Human Rights
● Security and Defence
● Development
● International Trade
● Budgets
● Budgetary Control
● Economic and Monetary Affairs
● Employment and Social Affairs
● Environment, Public Health and Food Safety
● Industry, Research and Energy
● Internal Market and Consumer Protection
● Transport and Tourism
● Regional Development
● Agriculture and Rural Development
● Fisheries
● Culture and Education
● Legal Affairs
● Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs
● Constitutional Affairs
● Women's Rights and Gender Equality
● Petitions

18. Datasets
● Europarl debate registry
debates, speakers, speeches, texts*
● Europarl MEP database
party, committee, country, delegation
● Europarl report registry
committee / theme

19. Data model

20. Data model

21. Enriching the data (3)
In which role is
this person
speaking?

22. Enriching the data (3)
Heuristic processing!

23. Ideas for applications
● data enrichment:
geographical dataset, encyclopedia, voting info (Eur-Lex)
● applications:
topic preference of speakers by country / geography / party
cross-lingual language use
sentiment analysis

24. Creative camp
● Bring together developers and academic researchers from across Europe
● Promoting inventive use of the EP dataset, exploiting web and natural
language processing techniques to add new knowledge and functionality to
the dataset
● 6-10 October 2014 at NISV (Hilversum, The Netherlands)
● Submissions due: Friday 20 June
www.talkofeurope.eu/cfp

25. More info
General info: www.talkofeurope.eu
Creative camp: www.talkofeurope.eu/cfp/
Astrid a.e.van.aggelen@vu.nl
Max kemman@eshcc.eur.nl / @MaxJ_K