Analysis of Speeches in Indian Parliamentary Debates

Abstract: With the increasing usage of the internet, more and more data is being digitized including parliamentary debates but they are in an unstructured format. There is a need to convert them into a structured format for linguistic analysis. Much work has been done on parliamentary data such as Hansard, American congressional floor-debate data on various aspects but less on pragmatics. In this paper, we provide a dataset for the synopsis of Indian parliamentary debates and perform stance classification of speeches i.e identifying if the speaker is supporting the bill/issue or against it. We also analyze the intention of the speeches beyond mere sentences i.e pragmatics in the parliament. Based on thorough manual analysis of the debates, we developed an annotation scheme of 4 mutually exclusive categories to analyze the purpose of the speeches: to find out ISSUES, to BLAME, to APPRECIATE and for CALL FOR ACTION. We have annotated the dataset provided, with these 4 categories and conducted preliminary experiments for automatic detection of the categories. Our automated classification approach gave us promising results.