Budget argument mining attempts to identify argumentative components related to a budget item, and then classifies these argumentative components, given budget information and minutes. We describe the construction of the dataset for budget argument mining, a subtask of QA Lab-PoliInfo-3 in NTCIR-16. Budget argument mining analyses the argument structure of the minutes, focusing on monetary expressions (amount of money). In this task, given sufficient budget information (budget item, budget amount, etc.), relevant argumentative components in the minutes are identified and argument labels (claim, premise, and other) are assigned their components. In this paper, we describe the design of the data format, the annotation procedure, and release information of budget argument mining dataset, to link budget information to minutes.

In this study, we construct a corpus of Japanese local assembly minutes. All speeches in an assembly were transcribed into a local assembly minutes based on the local autonomy law. Therefore, the local assembly minutes form an extremely large amount of text data. Our ultimate objectives were to summarize and present the arguments in the assemblies, and to use the minutes as primary information for arguments in local politics. To achieve this, we structured all statements in assembly minutes. We focused on the structure of the discussion, i.e., the extraction of question and answer pairs. We organized the shared task “QA Lab-PoliInfo” in NTCIR 14. We conducted a “segmentation task” to identify the scope of one question and answer in the minutes as a sub task of the shared task. For the segmentation task, 24 runs from five teams were submitted. Based on the obtained results, the best recall was 1.000, best precision was 0.940, and best F-measure was 0.895.

This paper describes a Japanese political corpus created for interdisciplinary political research. The corpus contains the local assembly minutes of 47 prefectures from April 2011 to March 2015. This four-year period coincides with the term of office for assembly members in most autonomies. We analyze statistical data, such as the number of speakers, characters, and words, to clarify the characteristics of local assembly minutes. In addition, we identify problems associated with the different web services used by the autonomies to make the minutes available to the public.