Mova0.5 pre-release⌕
☰
home / docs / papers / Modern Hebrew / The Knesset Corpus: An Annotated Corpus of Hebrew Parliamentary Proceedings

The Knesset Corpus: An Annotated Corpus of Hebrew Parliamentary Proceedings

What it is about

The Knesset Corpus gathers the born-digital plenary (1992–2022) and committee (1998–2022) protocols of the Israeli parliament: 32.8M sentences and 384.6M tokens, with speaker and session metadata and a database of about 1,100 members and 150 factions. Scanned, OCRed protocols were left out because their quality was poor. Speakers were found by rules and fuzzy name matching (98.3% correct names, 94.5% correct MP links on a 20-file test). A 5,000-sentence subset was annotated by hand in UD v2.10 and used to train a Trankit parser (UPOS 98.94, UAS 97.79, LAS 97.17 F1). A learning-curve test shows that adding Knesset data helps every UD metric. Two use cases: type–token ratio falls over the years in both registers (plenary p=0.0029, committee p<10^-8), and women speakers use active voice more (75.4% vs 74.9%) and passive less (4.9% vs 5.3%), with the top verbs the same for both genders. The corpus is about 81% male-spoken.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 is a held-out test for 11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies and the parser in treebanks/he/ (the paper's subset is the source of iahltknesset); it is a measurement, not training data for the release. I2 goes into 8. Lexicon and register as a drift check for any corpus. I3 is a rule-and-count step for 05. The verb: system, binyanim, tense and use, with the unspecified share written in the output.

Topics: Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1007/s10579-025-09833-4 · arXiv 2405.18115

@misc{goldin2024knesset,
  title = {{The Knesset Corpus: An Annotated Corpus of Hebrew Parliamentary Proceedings}},
  author = {Goldin, Gili and Howell, Nick and Ordan, Noam and Rabinovich, Ella and Science, Shuly Wintner   Department of Computer and Haifa, University of and Israel and IAHLT and Israel and Science, School of Computer and Yaffo, The Academic College of Tel-Aviv and Israel)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1007/s10579-025-09833-4},
  eprint = {2405.18115},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-025-09833-4}
}

References

55 references, 8 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Abrami G, Bagci M, Hammerla L, et al (2022) German parliamentary corpus (GerParCor). In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 1900–1906, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.202 ↗
  2. Agnoloni T, Bartolini R, Frontini F, et al (2022) Making Italian parliamentary records machine-actionable: the construction of the ParlaMint-IT corpus. In: Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 117–124, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.parlaclarin-1.17 ↗
  3. Argamon S, Koppel M, Fine J, et al (2003) Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text 23 ↗
  4. Barbaresi A (2018) A corpus of German political speeches from the 21st century. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Miyazaki, Japan, URL https://aclanthology.org/L18-1127 ↗
  5. Beelen K, Thijm TA, Cochrane C, et al (2017) Digitization of the Canadian parliamentary debates. Canadian Journal of Political Science 50(3):849–864. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423916001165 ↗
  6. Blaette A, Rakers J, Leonhardt C (2022) How GermaParl evolves: Improving data quality by reproducible corpus preparation and user involvement. In: Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 7–15, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.parlaclarin-1.2 ↗
  7. Blätte A, Blessing A (2018) The GermaParl Corpus of Parliamentary Protocols. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA) find
  8. Cunningham KT, Haley KL (2020) Measuring lexical diversity for discourse analysis in aphasia: Moving-average type–token ratio and word information measure. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 63(3):710–721 ↗
  9. Daller H, Van Hout R, Treffers-Daller J (2003) Lexical richness in the spontaneous speech of bilinguals. Applied linguistics 24(2):197–222 ↗
  10. Erjavec T, Ogrodniczuk M, Osenova P, et al (2022) The parlamint corpora of parliamentary proceedings. Language Resources and Evaluation 57(1):415–448. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-021-09574-0, URL https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10579-021-09574-0 ↗
  11. Eyal M, Noga H, Aharoni R, et al (2023) Multilingual sequence-to-sequence models for Hebrew NLP. In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023. Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, pp 7700–7708, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.487, URL https://aclanthology.org/ 2023.findings-acl.487 ↗ our card
  12. Fabri R, Gasser M, Habash N, et al (2014) Linguistic introduction: The orthography, morphology and syntax of Semitic languages. In: Zitouni I (ed) Natural Language Processing of Semitic Languages. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, p 3–41, https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-642-45358-8_1, URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45358-8_1 ↗
  13. Fišer D, Eskevich M, de Jong F (eds) (2020) Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop, European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, URL https://aclanthology.org/2020.parlaclarin-1.0 ↗
  14. Fišer D, Eskevich M, Lenardič J, et al (eds) (2022) Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.parlaclarin-1.0 ↗
  15. Fišer D, Eskevich M, de Jong F (eds) (2018) Proceedings of LREC2018 Workshop ParlaCLARIN: Creating and Using Parliamentary Corpora., European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris, France Garera N, Yarowsky D (2009) Modeling latent biographic attributes in conversational genres. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP. Association for Computational Linguistics, Suntec, Singapore, pp 710–718, URL https://aclanthology.org/P09-1080 ↗
  16. Gretz S, Itai A, MacWhinney B, et al (2015) Parsing Hebrew CHILDES transcripts. Language Resources and Evaluation 49(1):107–145. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10579-013-9256-x, URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9256-x ↗
  17. Guibon G, Courtin M, Gerdes K, et al (2020) When collaborative treebank curation meets graph grammars. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 5291–5300, URL https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.651 ↗
  18. Hansen DH, Navarretta C, Offersgaard L (2018) A pilot gender study of the Danish parliament corpus. In: Proceedings of the ParlaClarin workshop at the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. find
  19. European Language Resources Association Hladka B, Kopp M, Straňák P (2020) Compiling Czech parliamentary stenographic protocols into a corpus. In: Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 18–22, URL https://aclanthology.org/2020.parlaclarin-1.4 ↗
  20. Hussain MM, Mahmud I (2019) pyMannKendall: a python package for non parametric Mann Kendall family of trend tests. Journal of Open Source Software 4(39):1556. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01556, URL http://dx.doi.org/10.21105/joss.01556 ↗
  21. Ilie C (2017) Parliamentary debates. In: Wodak R, Forchtner B (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. Taylor and Francis, chap 20 find
  22. Itai A, Wintner S (2008) Language resources for Hebrew. Language Resources and Evaluation 42(1):75–98 ↗
  23. Kawintiranon K, Singh L (2021) Knowledge enhanced masked language model for stance detection. In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, pp 4725–4735, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.376, URL https://aclanthology.org/ 2021.naacl-main.376 ↗
  24. Kessler J (2017) Scattertext: a browser-based tool for visualizing how corpora differ. In: Proceedings of ACL 2017, System Demonstrations. Association for Computational Linguistics, Vancouver, Canada, pp 85–90, URL https://aclanthology.org/P17-4015 ↗
  25. Koehn P (2005) Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit X: Papers, Phuket, Thailand, pp 79–86, URL https://aclanthology.org/2005.mtsummit-papers.11 ↗
  26. Koppel M, Argamon S, Shimoni AR (2003) Automatically categorizing written texts by author gender. Literary and Linguistic Computing 14(3) ↗
  27. Kumar S, Wintner S, Smith NA, et al (2019) Topics to avoid: Demoting latent confounds in text classification. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, China, pp 4153–4163, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/ D19-1425, URL https://aclanthology.org/D19-1425 ↗
  28. Lakoff R (1973) Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2(1):45–80. URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/4166707 ↗
  29. Lapponi E, Søyland MG, Velldal E, et al (2018) The talk of Norway: a richly annotated corpus of the Norwegian parliament, 1998–2016. Language Resources and Evaluation 52(3):873–893. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-018-9411-5, URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-018-9411-5 ↗
  30. Litvinova T, Seredin P, Litvinova O, et al (2017) Differences in type-token ratio and part-of-speech frequencies in male and female russian written texts. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation, pp 69–73 find
  31. de Marneffe MC, Manning CD, Nivre J, et al (2021) Universal Dependencies. Computational Linguistics 47(2):255–308. https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00402, URL https://aclanthology.org/2021.cl-2.11 ↗ our card
  32. Monroe BL, Colaresi MP, Quinn KM (2008) Fightin’words: Lexical feature selection and evaluation for identifying the content of political conflict. Political Analysis 16(4):372–403 find
  33. Muchnik M (2015) The Gender Challenge of Hebrew, The Brill reference library of Judaism, vol 42. find
  34. Brill, Leiden Nanni F, Osman M, Cheng YR, et al (2018) Ukparl: A semantified and topically organized corpus of political speeches. In: Fišer D, Eskevich M, de Jong F (eds) Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris, France Nguyen MV, Lai VD, Veyseh APB, et al (2021) Trankit: A light-weight transformer-based toolkit for multilingual natural language processing. In: Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations Ogrodniczuk M, Nitoń B (2020) New developments in the Polish parliamentary corpus. In: Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 1–4, URL https://aclanthology.org/ 2020.parlaclarin-1.1 ↗ our card
  35. Pancur A, Erjavec T (2020) The siParl corpus of Slovene parliamentary proceedings. In: Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 28–34, URL https://aclanthology.org/ 2020.parlaclarin-1.6 ↗
  36. Rabinovich E, Sultani M, Stevenson S (2019) CodeSwitch-Reddit: Exploration of written multilingual discourse in online discussion forums. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, China, pp 4776–4786, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1484, URL https://aclanthology.org/D19-1484 ↗
  37. Ratclif JW (1988) Pattern matching: the gestalt approach. Dr Dobb’s Journal URL https://www.drdobbs.com/database/pattern-matching-the-gestalt-approach/ 184407970?pgno=5 ↗
  38. Rubinstein A (2019) Historical corpora meet the digital humanities: the Jerusalem Corpus of Emergent Modern Hebrew. Language Resources and Evaluation 53:807 – 835. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:195367758 ↗
  39. Rúnarsson K, Sigurðsson EF (2020) Parsing Icelandic alþingi transcripts: Parliamentary speeches as a genre. In: Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 44–50, URL https://aclanthology.org/2020.parlaclarin-1.9 ↗
  40. Sade S, Seker A, Tsarfaty R (2018) The Hebrew Universal Dependency treebank: Past present and future. In: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018). Association for Computational Linguistics, Brussels, Belgium, pp 133–143, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18-6016, URL https://aclanthology.org/ W18-6016 ↗ our card
  41. Schmid HJ (2003) Do women and men really live in different cultures? evidence from the BNC. In: Wilson A, Rayson P, McEnery T (eds) Corpus linguistics by the Lune: a Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. Lodz Studies in Language, Peter Lang, p 185–221 find
  42. Seker A, Bandel E, Bareket D, et al (2022) AlephBERT: Language model pre-training and evaluation from sub-word to sentence level. In: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, pp 46–56, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.4, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.4 ↗ our card
  43. Shibata D, Wakamiya S, Ito K, et al (2018) Vocabchecker: Measuring language abilities for detecting early stage dementia. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, IUI ’18 Companion, https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3180308.3180332, URL https://doi.org/10.1145/3180308.3180332 ↗
  44. Shmidman A, Shmidman CS, Bareket D, et al (2023) Do pretrained contextual language models distinguish between Hebrew homograph analyses? In: Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, Dubrovnik, Croatia, pp 849–864, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.59, URL https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.59 ↗ our card
  45. Sima’an K, Itai A, Winter Y, et al (2001) Building a tree-bank of Modern Hebrew text. Traitement Automatique des Langues 42(2):247–380 find
  46. Skubic J, Fišer D (2022) Parliamentary discourse research in sociology: Literature review. In: Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 81–91, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.parlaclarin-1.12 ↗
  47. Solberg PE, Ortiz P (2022) The Norwegian parliamentary speech corpus. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, pp 1003–1008, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.106 ↗
  48. Speer R (2022) rspeer/wordfreq: v3.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7199437, URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7199437, software package Staples S, Reppen R (2016) Understanding first-year l2 writing: A lexico-grammatical analysis across l1s, genres, and language ratings. Journal of Second Language Writing 32:17–35 ↗
  49. Tyers FM, Howell N (2021) Morphological analysis and disambiguation for Breton. Language Resourources and Evaluation 55(2):431–473. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10579-020-09510-8, URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-020-09510-8 ↗
  50. Wintner S (2014) Morphological processing of Semitic languages. In: Zitouni I (ed) Natural Language Processing of Semitic Languages. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, p 43–66, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45358-8_2, URL http://dx.doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-642-45358-8_2 ↗
  51. Xia X (2013) Gender differences in using language. Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3(8):1485–1489. https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.3.8.1485-1489 ↗
  52. Zeldes A, Howell N, Ordan N, et al (2022) A second wave of UD Hebrew treebanking and cross-domain parsing. In: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, pp 4331–4344, https://doi.org/10.18653/ v1/2022.emnlp-main.292, URL https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.292 ↗ our card
  53. Zeman D, Hajič J, Popel M, et al (2018) CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual parsing from raw text to Universal Dependencies. In: Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Association for Computational Linguistics, Brussels, Belgium, pp 1–21, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/K18-2001, URL https://aclanthology.org/K18-2001 ↗ our card
  54. Zhou X, Gao Y, Lu X (2023) Lexical complexity changes in 100 years’ academic writing: Evidence from nature biology letters. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 64:101262. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101262, URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158523000486 ↗
  55. Štajner S, Mitkov R (2012) Using comparable corpora to track diachronic and synchronic changes in lexical density and lexical richness. In: Rapp R, Tadic M, Sharoff S, et al (eds) Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, held in conjunction with LREC’12. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Istanbul, Turkey find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/arxivrecent-2024-goldin-knesset-corpus-annotated-corpus-hebrew/