The Knesset Corpus: An Annotated Corpus of Hebrew Parliamentary Proceedings

TL;DR

The Knesset Corpus is a comprehensive, annotated dataset of Hebrew parliamentary proceedings from 1998 to 2022, enabling diverse research in linguistics, political science, and social studies.

Contribution

This paper introduces a large, annotated corpus of Hebrew parliamentary data with demographic and political metadata, facilitating new research opportunities.

Findings

Lexical richness decreased over time in proceedings

Gender-based stylistic differences observed among speakers

Corpus supports interdisciplinary research in social sciences

Abstract

We present the Knesset Corpus, a corpus of Hebrew parliamentary proceedings containing over 30 million sentences (over 384 million tokens) from all the (plenary and committee) protocols held in the Israeli parliament between 1998 and 2022. Sentences are annotated with morpho-syntactic information and are associated with detailed meta-information reflecting demographic and political properties of the speakers, based on a large database of parliament members and factions that we compiled. We discuss the structure and composition of the corpus and the various processing steps we applied to it. To demonstrate the utility of this novel dataset we present two use cases. We show that the corpus can be used to examine historical developments in the style of political discussions by showing a reduction in lexical richness in the proceedings over time. We also investigate some differences between the styles of men and women speakers. These use cases exemplify the potential of the corpus to shed light on important trends in the Israeli society, supporting research in linguistics, political science, communication, law, etc.