What Can Be Seen from the Prefectural Assembly Minutes?

Abstract

We created a corpus for prefectural assembly minutes. Each record in the corpus has a field of "speaker's name." This field is manually checked to improve credibility of the corpus. The corpus also has attributes of speakers (namely, electoral district, birth year and gender) in the case of assembly members. We try to analyze the corpus and illustrate activities of all assembly members in Japan. This paper describes: 1) the number of assembly members in Japan, 2) age and gender composition of assembly members, 3) difference in the amount of speech depending on age and gender, 4) difference in the contents of speech depending on gender, 5) difference in the contents of speech depending on age.