Presentation of the paper 'Bringing parliamentary debates to the Semantic Web' by Damir Juric, Laura Hollink and Geert-Jan Houben at the workshop on Detection, Representation, and Exploitation of Events in the Semantic Web (DeRiVE2012) in conjunction with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference 2012 in Boston, USA. See also the homepage of the PoliMedia project: http://polimedia.nl/

1. Bringing parliamentary debates to the Semantic Web
Damir Juric1,3, Laura Hollink2, Geert-Jan Houben1
1 Delft University of Technology, 2 VU University Amsterdam, 3 FER University of Zagreb
DERIVE 2012
Boston, 12.11.2012.

2. Motivation
Cross-media comparison:
• What choices do different media make in the coverage of people and topics while
reporting on political events?
• Does the representation of topics and people change over time and how do the
various media types differ?

3. Motivation
Political events
Media
Cross-media comparison:
• What choices do different media make in the coverage of people and topics while
reporting on political events?
• Does the representation of topics and people change over time and how do the
various media types differ?

4. Background: the
PoliMedia project
• Funded by CLARIN-NL
• May 2012 - May 2013
• 3 phases :
I. modeling phase: creating
a semantic model (this
presentation)
II. data production phase:
creating links between
political events and media
III.application phase:
searching and navigating
linked datasets
• www.polimedia.nl

5. Research questions
• How to represent political events on the Semantic Web?
• How to represent links between media and political events on
the Semantic Web?

6. Research questions
• How to represent political events on the Semantic Web?
• How to represent links between media and political events on
the Semantic Web?

7. Political events data set
• Events: Dutch parliamentary debates
Handelingen der Staten-General or Dutch Hansard
• Some provenance:
1. Transcripts are made of the complete
debates of the Dutch parliament.
2. Published online by the government on
http://www.statengeneraaldigitaal.nl/ (1818
1995) and http://
officielebekendmakingen.nl/ (from 1995)
3. PoliticalMashup project has translated
government pdf and txt files into XML, incl
URI’s as identifiers, see http://
politicalmashup.nl/
4. We build on that.

8. Media data sets
• newspaper articles and radio bulletins
• at the National Library of the Netherlands
• Many, mostly regional news papers 1950-
1995
• Text + images of newspaper layout
• newscasts
• at the Netherlands institute for Sound and
Vision
• evening news and current affairs
programs
• metadata in Dublin Core and CDMI format
• enriched with thesaurus terms from the
Gemeenschappelijke Thesaurus
Audiovisuele Archieven (GTAA)

9. Semantic model: what do we need to represent? 1/2
• Important information for every parliamentary debate is: Debate
• When the debate was held Metadata
• What is being said in the debate (topics)
Topic 1
• Who is giving the speeches in the debate and in which
role (persons)
Speaker 1 / Content
• Additional information about actors involved in the
event (names of the politicians, their party, age, etc.)
Speaker 2 / Content
• Structure: Subparts of the debate have their own
identifiers (part of the debate where only one speaker
can be identified as actor) Speaker 3 / Content
• chronological order (the order in which the subparts
where occurring inside the parliament debate,
• Named entities apart from politicians (persons, Topic 2
locations, etc.)
Speaker 1 / Content

10. Semantic model: what do we need to represent? 2/2
• Various information about media
items linked to the debate
• Links between subparts of the
debate and news articles, radio
bulletins and television newscasts

11. URI’s
• PoliMedia vocabulary: http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/nl/polivoc#Speech
• Politicians, parties: http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/nl/poli#Beel
• debates and part of debates: http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/nl/nl.proc.sgd.d.
198219830000846.2.11.12
• Media articles, bulletins and news casts: http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:
010069811:mpeg21:pdf

12. Semantic model

13. Semantic model

14. Semantic model

15. Semantic model

16. Semantic model

17. Semantic model W.R. van Hage, V. Malaisé, R.
Segers, L. Hollink and A.Th.
Schreiber. Design and use of
the Simple Event Model
(SEM)

18. Semantic model W.R. van Hage, V. Malaisé, R.
Segers, L. Hollink and A.Th.
Schreiber. Design and use of
the Simple Event Model
(SEM)

19. Current work: finding links
• Queries: speaker name + named entities + topics (created using
topic modeling methods) extracted from political events dataset
• used for retrieval of media articles
TopicList =
NamedEntitiesVector TopicWordSetVector NamedEntitiesVector TopicWordSetVector
Speech Speech PartOfDebate PartOfDebate
+
Speaker X =
ActorFromSpeech TimeFrame

20. Finally
• SPARQL endpoint with the PoliMedia vocabulary + RDF of Dutch Hansard
data will be available soon.
• Feel free to use it!
• Links to media + search/browse app are expected early next year.

21. Thank you for your
attention!
Henri Beunders (EUR) Damir Juric (TU Delft)
Jaap Blom (NISV) Max Kemman (EUR)
Laura Hollink (VU) Martijn Kleppe (EUR)
Geert-Jan Houben (TU Delft) Johan Oomen (NISV)