The Swedish parliamentary debates have been available since 2010 through the parliament’s open data web site Riksdagens öppna data. While fairly comprehensive, the structure of the data can be hard to understand and its content is somewhat noisy for use as a quality language resource. In order to make them easier to use and process – in particular for language technology research, but also for political science and other fields with an interest in parliamentary data – we have published a large selection of the debates in a cleaned and structured format, annotated with linguistic information and augmented with semantic links. Especially prevalent in the parliament’s data were end-line hyphenations – something that tokenisers generally are not equipped for – and a lot of the effort went into resolving these. In this paper, we provide detailed descriptions of the structure and contents of the resource, and explain how it differs from the parliament’s own version.

As part of a larger project on argument mining of Swedish parliamentary data, we have created a semantic graph that, together with named entity recognition and resolution (NER), should make it easier to establish connections between arguments in a given debate. The graph is essentially a semantic database that keeps track of Members of Parliament (MPs), in particular their presence in the parliament and activity in debates, but also party affiliation and participation in commissions. The hope is that the Swedish PoliGraph will enable us to perform named entity resolution on debates in the Swedish parliament with a high accuracy, with the aim of determining to whom an argument is directed.