Construction of Japanese Imperial Diet Database Using Deep Neural Network

Abstract

In this work we construct a database of the Japanese Imperial Diet. The Imperial Diet was established in 1890 after the promulgation of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan and its historical analysis is crucial to understand the actual functioning of the Japanese Diet. Since the minutes of the Imperial Diet were publicly available only in image format, textization is an imperative process for further analysis. Following the recent advancement of the deep neural networks (DNNs), especially in the character recognition, we apply DNNs to construct a text database of the Imperial Diet. In the course of textization, we trained DNNs using multiple datasets while introducing a novel approach of applying separate batch normalization to datasets. The results of the tentative analysis show a significant potential to deepen our understanding of the development of parliamentary democracy in Japan.