Parliamentary Discourse

The analysis of US political language is usually based on the written form (e.g. presidential addresses) or posts broadcasted on various social networks. Oral production, however, which is even more frequent, can better reveal the style and mode of thinking of the speaker. This study covers this mode of linguistic communication by considering 19 candidates from the presidential elections between 1960 to 2024. Our main research objectives are to disclose the main trends hidden in those presidential debates. Do we observe a clear simplification of the US political language over time? Does Trump have poor language compared to the other candidates? Do unusual stylistic features occur only with a single, specific president? Moreover, can we detect a pattern explaining the success or failure of some nominees? Over time, this study demonstrates a significant reduction in political language complexity, a decrease of the mean sentence length, and a noteworthy decline of complex terms. Moreover, the emotional tone increases over the decades, while logical and rational thinking tends to lessen.

Truth and evidence-based communication provide important foundations for democratic governance, accountability, and collective decision-making. Prior work shows that evidence-oriented language in US congressional floor speeches has declined since the mid-1970s, alongside broader changes in legislative productivity and polarization. This study shifts the analysis from congressional sessions to individual members of Congress to examine whether epistemic orientation varies systematically across legislators and whether it relates to political behavior and legislative effectiveness. Using the Evidence-Minus-Intuition (EMI) score, we measure the relative prevalence of evidence-oriented versus intuition-oriented language in congressional floor speeches and Twitter posts. We link these measures to legislator-level data on ideology, institutional position, communication context, and Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES). The results show that more ideologically extreme members use less evidence-oriented language on the congressional floor. EMI also exhibits cross-platform consistency with members who use more evidence-oriented language in floor speeches also being more evidence-oriented on Twitter, although EMI is lower on Twitter overall. Finally, EMI in congressional speeches is positively associated with individual legislative effectiveness, even after accounting for ideology and extensive political, institutional, demographic, topical, and communication volume controls. These findings suggest that evidence-oriented language is not only an aggregate feature of congressional discourse but also a meaningful attribute of individual-level legislative communication and effectiveness.

Emotions are a pervasive feature of political communication, yet existing research has focused primarily on describing patterns of emotional expression rather than examining whether they are associated with consequential legislative outcomes. We address this gap by investigating the expression and correlates of discrete emotions in more than 1.7 million speeches delivered in the U.S. Congress between 1973 and 2024. Using a transformer-based emotion classifier, we measure eight discrete emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, enthusiasm, pride, and hope. We examine how these emotions vary over time, across policy topics, legislator characteristics, and their relationship with legislative effectiveness. We find that congressional speeches are becoming emotionally expressive over time. Emotional expression also varies systematically across policy domains and ideological positioning of legislators. Notably, the relationship between emotional expression and legislative effectiveness depends on the specific emotions expressed: enthusiasm and pride are positively associated with effectiveness, whereas anger exhibits a negative association. Emotional valence and emotional diversity are positively associated with legislative effectiveness, while emotional intensity is negatively associated with legislative effectiveness. These findings demonstrate that computationally derived measures of discrete emotions can provide insight into affective dimensions of legislative speeches and facilitate our understanding of how legislators communicate, interact, and perform within democratic institutions.

We present three large-scale studies of spoken parliamentary speech across four Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian), drawing on over 6,000 hours from the ParlaSpeech 3.0 corpus. The first study examines how utterance-level sentiment shapes acoustic realisation: negative speech is consistently produced with higher pitch, greater intensity, and faster rate across all four parliaments, with a secondary arousal-driven upturn at the most positive extreme. The second study models filled pause frequency using negative binomial GEE, finding that speech rate, age, and sentiment are robust cross-lingual predictors, while gender effects reverse between South Slavic (men produce fewer filled pauses) and West Slavic parliaments (no gender difference) - a pattern invisible to single-language designs. The third study investigates primary stress variation in Croatian, showing that speaker-level preferences for early versus late stress cohere across verbs, adjectives, and nouns but decouple for adverbs and proper nouns. We conclude with a research agenda spanning corpus phonetics, disfluency modelling, and political rhetoric.

The language a legislature uses to debate women's rights, even in favour of them, encodes systematic patterns of sexism that persist across two centuries. In this work, we analyse 6,531 speeches over 200 years of UK parliamentary debate (Hansard, 1803-2005) by using large language models to classify a speaker's perspective towards women's suffrage and political representation, as well as analyse sexist speech in parliament from the lens of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. We also release this parliamentary dataset, an organized and metadata-enriched version of the publicly available Hansard Corpus optimized for computational social science research, with 6.7 million speeches across 1.2 million debates, with 89% gender-matching for speeches by MPs from the House of Commons. We find that 54% of speeches opposing women's representation contain sexist content, compared to 21% of speeches that are for the cause, and that the two sides use fundamentally different types of sexism: anti-suffrage rhetoric combines hostile and benevolent framing, while pro-suffrage sexism is overwhelmingly benevolent. Female MPs support women's political rights at 93% compared to 70% for male MPs, a gap that closes only after enfranchisement. Our findings are evidence that benevolent and hostile sexism are used in different rhetorical contexts in a manner consistent with the theory of Ambivalent Sexism.

Parliamentary proceedings are a primary record of democratic deliberation, yet their volume and fragmentation make multi-perspective access difficult for citizens, journalists, and researchers. Applying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to parliamentary transcripts introduces three specific risks: dominance of the most frequent speakers, inability to weight speakers according to topical expertise, and citation misattribution in politically sensitive text. We present ParliamentRAG, a RAG system for the Italian Chamber of Deputies that addresses these risks jointly. Its core contribution is a topic-dependent authority model that estimates each speaker's authority as a function of the current query, combining interpretable components such as profession, education, and previous interventions. Given a user query, the system retrieves relevant speech chunks, identifies topic-relevant experts across parliamentary groups, and generates a summary synthesizing their perspectives, accompanied by supporting quotations. ParliamentRAG is evaluated against Google NotebookLM on 15 policy topics via a two-level protocol combining automated metrics and blind A/B human evaluation by six domain experts. The system achieves higher coverage across political groups (0.97 vs. 0.95), perfect quotation faithfulness (1.00 vs. 0.95), and stronger expert preferences on source-related dimensions, while NotebookLM remains stronger on prose-oriented dimensions.

Self-introductions are common in legislative committee testimonies. Successfully detecting them and extracting the speaker's name is enormously helpful in the task of speaker identification in the context of government meetings. In this paper, we present a pipeline for detection of self-introductions in legislative committee testimony using machine learning. We construct a training dataset from 1.54 million utterances spanning five state legislative sessions, apply a name-matching heuristic to generate automatic labels, and train three classifiers: a decision tree, random forest, and XGBoost to find self-introductions and extract the speaker's name. We construct a feature set combining bag-of-words, positional context, structural signals, introductory phrase indicators, and discourse context features. Among the three classifiers, XGBoost achieves the best performance with an F1 score of 0.9747 and the fewest total errors; adding fine-tuned BERT probability features improves this further. As an extension, we score the full candidate dataset with a fine-tuned BERT classifier and add BERT probability outputs as features. This BERT-augmented XGBoost model improves F1 from 0.9747 to 0.9782 and reduces total test errors from 241 to 207. The primary gain over the decision tree baseline (F1 0.9323) is driven by discourse context features and the boosting ensemble strategy; BERT provides a modest complementary signal. Analysis of false positives reveals that a minority are genuine self-introductions mislabeled due to name inconsistencies in the source data, indicating that measured metrics modestly understate true performance.

Large language models (LLMs) can leave small stylistic traces in text written with their help. The most discussed is the em-dash (U+2014), especially the unspaced form word---word, which is normal in typeset English prose but unusual in U.S. press writing, where AP style calls for spaced dashes. This study asks whether that trace is measurable in congressional press releases. In a preregistered design (OSF: 10.17605/OSF.IO/U5NEY), 146,239 scraper-sourced releases from 480 House and Senate offices (2021-2025, the open congress-press dataset) were analyzed: density of unspaced prose-form em-dashes per 1,000 characters of cleaned text, Poisson/negative-binomial models with a length offset, clustering by office. Density stayed within 0.10-0.12 per 1,000 characters through 2021-2024, then rose to 0.217 in 2025, more than twice the four-year baseline; the share of releases with such an em-dash rose from ~13% to 24.8%. The primary frequency ratio (2023-2025 vs 2021-2022) was 1.55 (95% CI 1.28-1.93; exact registered cut-off: 1.528), just above the prespecified 1.5x threshold. The rise was net-new (hyphen density stable), held within authors (75.6% of 262 continuous offices increased; p ~ 1e-16) and in a closed panel of 224 offices, and survived falsification tests: three placebo cut-offs were null, the pipeline showed no step at the 2024/2025 boundary, and continuing offices carried the rise. A segmented regression finds no step at the ChatGPT cut-off but a clear post-period acceleration; the 2025 rise is symmetric across parties and chambers. Because the registered validation gate was formally breached, the full preregistered decision rule was not met; the interpretation (broad diffusion of LLM-assisted writing as the models matured) is offered as exploratory. The em-dash remains a population-level marker, not a per-release authorship detector, and the design supports no causal claim.

The spread of misinformation is widely perceived as a threat to democratic deliberation, yet how political elites' rhetorical commitments to truth shift alongside the rise of populist actors remains poorly understood. Analysing 4.5 million tweets and 59,170 parliamentary speeches by German political elites between 2015 and 2025, we measure evidence-based and intuition-based rhetoric using a validated distributed dictionary representation. Across both arenas, intuition-based language has become more prominent, and right-leaning actors consistently exhibit the lowest Evidence Minus Intuition (EMI) scores. The parliamentary entry of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2017 coincides with sharp downward shifts in EMI across the broader chamber, while a more gradual decline is observed on Twitter. These findings document an association between far-right visibility and a changing approach to truth in elite discourse in a multiparty European democracy.

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed as agents in high-stakes settings, such as medical and legal systems, understanding their deceptive capabilities is fundamental to safety. Controlled social deduction games provide a reproducible proxy for isolating and evaluating these complex adversarial behaviors. We present the open-source benchmark framework ParliamentBench based on the game Secret Hitler to evaluate LLMs in scenarios that require deception, persuasion, and reasoning under information asymmetry. We evaluate 16 LLMs across 1,600 simulated matches playing each other, playing against humans, and compare them against a large set of online games. We introduce three novel metrics that isolate social deduction, reasoning, and deceptive consistency. Our experiments reveal that frontier models achieve strong performance across cooperative and deceptive roles, with a strong top-four cluster (GPT-5.4, Kimi K2.5, Grok 4.1 Fast, and DeepSeek 3.1 Terminus), whereas the weakest models fall short of random (33%) and simple algorithmic (45%) baselines. Most LLMs struggle to maintain a consistent deceptive persona throughout an entire game, with deception retention dropping below 50%.

Filled pauses (FPs) are a universal feature of spontaneous speech, yet most studies rely on small, single-language corpora, limiting the generalisability of their findings. We analyse ~4,000 hours of parliamentary speech across four related Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian). FP occurrence is obtained via transformer-based automatic detection, while FP rate is modelled using Generalised Estimating Equations (GEE) with Mundlak correction to distinguish within- from between- speaker effects. We replicate a negative association of age and speech rate with FP rate, but find that gender effects are language-specific and directionally opposite to most prior literature. Novel analyses of sentiment, political orientation, and power status reveal a consistent positive association between sentiment and FP rate, alongside parliament-specific modulation by orientation and power status, with opposition speakers tending toward lower FP rates than governing coalition speakers.

We present HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic: a French-language dataset of multi-hop historical questions derived from parliamentary debates and newspapers of the French Third Republic. Designed in collaboration with a historian, the corpus captures complex reasoning patterns typical of historical inquiry, including cross-source synthesis, temporal reasoning, and the integration of sparse evidence. The dataset is made of 1782 questions and emphasizes multi-hop connections across heterogeneous historical documents, providing a resource for evaluating retrieval-augmented and large language model systems in domain-specific contexts. We describe the methodology for constructing the corpus, including the selection and alignment of sources, question validation, and metadata integration. While the dataset focuses on French historical documents, our methodology can be readily adapted to other languages and national corpora. Finally, we demonstrate how the corpus can support realistic evaluation scenarios for multi-hop question answering, bridging the gap between NLP benchmarks and the needs of historical scholarship.

In this paper, we evaluate the extent of undisclosed LLM-generated content in texts from the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. In many areas, such as in journalism or in academic writing, there are often requirements to clearly disclose whether AI tools, such as LLMs, have been used. In the case of parliamentary texts, the guidelines on disclosure of AI use are more vague. However, in order to maintain transparency and retain public trust, it is generally recommended that parliamentarians should state whether or not they have used AI when writing texts, such as parliamentary motions. Here, we train an interpretable (glass-box) text classifier using pre-LLM parliamentary texts and LLM-generated versions of such texts. We then apply the classifier to a test set containing recent parliamentary texts, finding a steady increase in undisclosed LLM use, in both parliaments, from 2022 onwards.

State-of-the-art performance for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) largely depends on the availability of large-scale labeled corpora. This creates a demand for increased data collection efforts, particularly for under-represented languages and dialectal varieties. Due to having considerably fewer speakers (around 11 million), European Portuguese (EP) is overshadowed by Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (around 200 million speakers) in currently available large-scale speech data resources, resulting in under-performing speech-based systems for EP users. To address this gap, and following similar data collection efforts for other languages, we present FalAR, a large-scale, speaker-annotated speech corpus of European Portuguese parliamentary sessions. Spanning approximately 20 years, FalAR comprises 5,800 hours of speech data. In addition, 4,850 hours have speaker identity annotations, for a total of 1,180 speakers with associated metadata including age, gender, political affiliation, and parliamentary role. The corpus was built using a state-of-the-art EP CAMÕES ASR model for transcription-reference alignment. In this paper, we describe the data collection process, together with the main characteristics of the FalAR corpus. Furthermore, we evaluate the trade-off between data quantity and alignment accuracy on ASR performance, with our experiments demonstrating that incorporating FalAR as pre-training data yields up to 14% relative WER improvement over baseline models.

Katharevousa Greek remains poorly served by contemporary NLP pipelines despite its importance for legal, administrative, and parliamentary archives. We present a reproducible workflow for building and evaluating a Universal Dependencies-style parsing resource for Katharevousa parliamentary questions from Greece's early post-junta period. The pipeline links OCR-aware reconstruction, schema-constrained LLM-assisted annotation, automatic validation, deterministic CoNLL-U snapshotting, fixed-split evaluation, and model-family comparison. The frozen automatically validated reference set contains 1{,}697 sentences, split into 1{,}357 training sentences and 340 held-out test sentences. We compare off-the-shelf Greek and Ancient Greek parsers, a feature-based parser, mBERT, XLM-R, and custom Stanza training under the same scoring protocol. Off-the-shelf systems show substantial register mismatch: the strongest external baseline, spaCy Greek, reaches 0.4183 LAS. The best structural parser, an XLM-R model, reaches 0.8893 UPOS accuracy, 0.7250 dependency-relation F1, 0.6098 UAS, and 0.5162 LAS, an absolute LAS gain of 0.0980 over the best external baseline. The feature-based model remains competitive for UPOS and relation labeling, indicating that transparent lexical-context features still matter at this data scale. Beyond scores, the paper contributes an auditable methodology for turning difficult historical parliamentary OCR into reusable syntactic NLP infrastructure. The entire pipeline -- code, schema, frozen reference annotations, fixed train/test split, and per-model benchmark reports -- is released as an open-access companion to this paper.

Analyses of legislative behavior often rely on voting records, overlooking the rich semantic and rhetorical content of political speech. In this paper, we ask three complementary questions about parliamentary discourse: how things are said, what is being said, and who is speaking in discursively similar ways. To answer these questions, we introduce a scalable and generalizable computational framework that combines diachronic stylometric analysis, contextual topic modeling, and semantic clustering of deputies' speeches. We apply this framework to a large-scale case study of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, using a corpus of over 450,000 speeches from 2003 to 2025. Our results show a long-term stylistic shift toward shorter and more direct speeches, a legislative agenda that reorients sharply in response to national crises, and a granular map of discursive alignments in which regional and gender identities often prove more salient than formal party affiliation. More broadly, this work offers a robust methodology for analyzing parliamentary discourse as a multidimensional phenomenon that complements traditional vote-based approaches.

The pursuit of truth is central to democratic deliberation and governance, yet political discourse reflects varying epistemic orientations, ranging from evidence-based reasoning grounded in verifiable information to intuition-based reasoning rooted in beliefs and subjective interpretation. We introduce a scalable approach to measure epistemic orientation using the Evidence--Minus--Intuition (EMI) score, derived from large language model (LLM) ratings and embedding-based semantic similarity. Applying this approach to 15 million parliamentary speech segments spanning 1946 to 2025 across seven countries, we examine temporal patterns in discourse and its association with deliberative democracy and governance. We find that EMI is positively associated with deliberative democracy within countries over time, with consistent relationships in both contemporaneous and lagged analyses. EMI is also positively associated with the transparency and predictable implementation of laws as a dimension of governance. These findings suggest that the epistemic nature of political discourse is crucial for both the quality of democracy and governance.

Understanding how policy is debated and justified in parliament is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. However, the volume and complexity of such debates mean that outside audiences struggle to engage. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to enable automated summarisation at scale. While summaries of debates can make parliamentary procedures more accessible, evaluating whether these summaries faithfully communicate argumentative content remains challenging. Existing automated summarisation metrics have been shown to correlate poorly with human judgements of consistency (i.e., faithfulness or alignment between summary and source). In this work, we propose a formal framework for evaluating parliamentary debate summaries that grounds argument structures in the contested proposals up for debate. Our novel approach, driven by computational argumentation, focuses the evaluation on formal properties concerning the faithful preservation of the reasoning presented to justify or oppose policy outcomes. We demonstrate our methods using a case-study of debates from the European Parliament and associated LLM-driven summaries.

This paper introduces an updated and combined version of the bidirectional English-German EPIC-UdS (spoken) and EuroParl-UdS (written) corpora containing original European Parliament speeches as well as their translations and interpretations. The new version corrects metadata and text errors identified through previous use, refines the content, updates linguistic annotations, and adds new layers, including word alignment and word-level surprisal indices. The combined resource is designed to support research using information-theoretic approaches to language variation, particularly studies comparing written and spoken modes, and examining disfluencies in speech, as well as traditional translationese studies, including parallel (source vs. target) and comparable (original vs. translated) analyses. The paper outlines the updates introduced in this release, summarises previous results based on the corpus, and presents a new illustrative study. The study validates the integrity of the rebuilt spoken data and evaluates probabilistic measures derived from base and fine-tuned GPT-2 and machine translation models on the task of filler particles prediction in interpreting.

We present a collection of open, machine-readable document datasets covering parliamentary proceedings, legal judgments, government publications, news, and tourism statistics from Sri Lanka. The collection currently comprises of 278,621 documents (80.7 GB) across 26 datasets in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. The datasets are updated daily and mirrored on GitHub and Hugging Face. These resources aim to support research in computational linguistics, legal analytics, socio-political studies, and multilingual natural language processing. We describe the data sources, collection pipeline, formats, and potential use cases, while discussing licensing and ethical considerations. This manuscript is at version v2026-07-02-0940.