Abstract
In recent years, minutes of regional assemblies and the National Diet have been published on the web. Those minutes have long recorded transcribed discussions of mayors and members of assemblies. Therefore, they are a target of study in various fields such as politics, economics, linguistics, information engineering. Since the minutes of the National Diet are maintained in electronic form and freely available via a search system, many researchers have utilized the minutes as a target of study. Minutes of regional assembly meetings are also the focus of researchers in various fields. However, researchers have had trouble gathering and preparing minutes for their study, because the way in which minutes are made available to the public varies assembly by assembly. It is very inefficient for each researcher to make the effort to digitize minutes separately. To improve the situation and contribute to research communities, we have collected regional minutes of assemblies and constructed the corpus of regional assembly minutes. In this paper, we discussed the construction of the corpus of regional assembly minutes. The corpus records minutes from regional assemblies all over Japan that are available on the web. We added additional information to the corpus, such as “date,” “name of meeting,” “name of speaker,” “text of statement,” so that users may search statements across the corpus using such information. The final goal of our project is to build a political information system that can recommend a suitable person, or members of an assembly, according to the consistency between users’ opinions and statements of assembly members. As a preliminary step of development, we annotated a part of the corpus with information about the speaker’s attitude to specific political subjects, including degree of approval/disapproval. In this paper, we also report the result of the annotation.
