polmine/germaparl2

GermaParl corpus of plenary protocols (v2)

germaparl2's Issues

Wrong attribution of party in Session #1 1949

The first speaker in the first session of the first legislative period should be a CDU speaker. But running this kwic query, we get a SPD speaker.

library(polmineR)

corpus("GERMAPARL2") %>% 
  subset(protocol_date == "1949-09-07") %>% 
  kwic(query = "Zukunft", s_attributes = c("protocol_date", "speaker_party"))

Yielding the result:

protocol_date	speaker_party	left	node	right
1949-09-07	SPD	Gesetz unseres gesetzgeberischen Handelns in	Zukunft	sein . Geistige und politische
1949-09-07	SPD	für eine glücklichere Entwicklung der	Zukunft	schöpfen wird . Lassen Sie

This is the XML of the protocol:
https://github.com/PolMine/GermaParlTEI/blob/main/01/BT_01_001.xml

This is the pdf:
https://dserver.bundestag.de/btp/01/01001.pdf

The term "Zukunft" ist part of a speech of "Präsident Dr. Köhler".

This is the Wikipedia entry for Erich Köhler (CDU): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Köhler#:~:text=Erich%20Köhler%20(*%2027.,erster%20Präsident%20des%20Deutschen%20Bundestages.

In the XML, we can see this line: Dr. Köhler is not recognized here as a speaker:
https://github.com/PolMine/GermaParlTEI/blob/d81fdf431efec3dbc0fb007993b9c936a84d1600/01/BT_01_001.xml#L175

The end of debates is missed in a number of protocols

Issue

Occasionally, the end of the debates is not recognized. In consequence, appendices or speeches which weren't held during the debate but entered into the minutes later are accidentally included in the final TEI and thus in the CWB corpus. This does not conform to the regular approach to only include speeches held during the debate. The extent of this extra content varies widely between protocols, from single lines to multiple additional speeches.

Example of the Issue

A preliminary analysis of this issue suggests that this is the case in quite a few sessions in the 2nd, the 17th and in particular in the 18th legislative period. It still occurs in other legislative periods as well, albeit to a lesser extent.

As an example see protocol 18/200.

Discussion

At first glance, there seem to be multiple reason for this:

• missing line breaks in the original file. In this case, the line containing the comment that indicates that the session ends does not end with the comment itself and the regular expression does not match.
• there are patterns for the end-of-debate comment which are plausible, but have been missed before.
• there are remaining encoding issues. In this case, the regular expression which is used to detect the end of the debate does not match because the apparent whitespace is no whitespace that is matched by "\s".