coastalcph/eu_debates

Dataset Description

EU Debates is a corpus of parliamentary proceedings (debates) from the European parliament released by Chalkidis and Brandl (2024). The corpus consists of approx. 87k individual speeches in the period 2009-2023. We exhaustively scrape the data from the official European Parliament Plenary website (Link). All speeches are time-stamped, thematically organized on debates, and include metadata relevant to the speaker's identity (full name, euro-party affiliation, speaker role), and the debate (date and title). Older debate speeches are originally in English, while newer ones are linguistically diverse across the 23 official EU languages, thus we also provide machine-translated versions in English, when official translations are missing, using the EasyNMT framework with the M2M2-100 (418M) model (Fan et al., 2020).

Data Fields

• speaker_name: a string` with the full name of the speaker.
• speaker_party: a string with the name of the euro-party (group) that the MEP is affiliated with.
• speaker_role: a string with the role of the speaker (Member of the European Parliament (MEP), EUROPARL President, etc.)
• debate_title: a string with the title of the debate in the European Parliament.
• date: a string with the full date (YYYY-MM-DD) of the speech.
• year a string with the year (YYYY).
• text: a string with the full speech of the speaker.
• translated_text: a string with the translation of the speech in English, if the original is not.

Data Instances

Example of a data instance from the EU Debates dataset:

{
'speaker_name': 'Michèle Striffler'
'speaker_party': 'PPE',
'speaker_role': 'MEP',
'debate_title': 'Famine in East Africa (debate)',
'date': '2011-09-15',
'year': '2011'
'text': "Monsieur le Président, Madame le Commissaire, chers collègues, la situation humanitaire sans précédent que connaît la Corne de l'Afrique continue [...]",
'translated_text': 'Mr. President, Mr. Commissioner, dear colleagues, the unprecedented humanitarian situation of the Horn of Africa continues [...]'}
}

How to use

from datasets import load_dataset
eu_debates_dataset = load_dataset('coastalcph/eu_debates', split='train')

Dataset Statistics

Distribution of speeches across euro-parties:

Euro-party	No. of Speeches
EPP	25,455 (29%)
S&D	20,042 (23%)
ALDE	8,946 (10%)
ECR	7,493 (9%)
ID	6,970 (8%)
GUE/NGL	6,780 (8%)
Greens/EFA	6,398 (7%)
NI	5,127 (6%)
Total	87,221

Distribution of speeches across years and euro-parties:

Year	EPP	S&D	ALDE	ECR	ID	GUE/NGL	Greens/EFA	NI	Total
2009	748	456	180	138	72	174	113	163	2044
2010	3205	1623	616	340	341	529	427	546	7627
2011	4479	2509	817	418	761	792	490	614	10880
2012	3366	1892	583	419	560	486	351	347	8004
2013	724	636	240	175	152	155	170	154	2406
2014	578	555	184	180	131	160	144	180	2112
2015	978	1029	337	405	398	325	246	240	3958
2016	919	972	309	387	457	317	225	151	3737
2017	649	766	181	288	321	229	162	135	2731
2018	554	611	161	242	248	175	160	133	2284
2019	1296	1339	719	556	513	463	490	353	5729
2020	1660	1564	823	828	661	526	604	346	7012
2021	2147	2189	1290	1062	909	708	990	625	9920
2022	2436	2273	1466	1177	827	962	1031	641	10813
2023	1716	1628	1040	878	619	779	795	499	7954

Distribution of speeches across the 23 EU official languages:

Language	Examples
en	40736 (46.7%)
de	6497 (7.5%)
fr	6024 (6.9%)
es	5172 (5.9%)
it	4506 (5.2%)
pl	3792 (4.4%)
pt	2713 (3.1%)
ro	2308 (2.7%)
el	2290 (2.6%)
nl	2286 (2.6%)
hu	1661 (1.9%)
hr	1509 (1.7%)
cs	1428 (1.6%)
sv	1210 (1.4%)
bg	928 (1.1%)
sk	916 (1.1%)
sl	753 (0.9%)
fi	693 (0.8%)
lt	618 (0.7%)
da	578 (0.7%)
et	342 (0.4%)
lv	184 (0.2%)
mt	0 (0.0%)

Citation Information

Llama meets EU: Investigating the European political spectrum through the lens of LLMs. Ilias Chalkidis and Stephanie Brandl. In the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Mexico City, Mexico, June 16–21, 2024.

@inproceedings{chalkidis-and-brandl-eu-llama-2024,
    title = "Llama meets EU: Investigating the European political spectrum through the lens of LLMs",
    author = "Chalkidis, Ilias  and Brandl, Stephanie",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jun,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
}