How Do the Members of a Parliament Negotiate? Analysing

Verbatim Records

Mare Koit

1 a

, Haldur Õim

2 b

and Tiit Roosmaa

1 c

Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, J. Liivi 2, Tartu, Estonia

Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2, Tartu, Estonia

Keywords: Negotiation, Parliament, Verbatim Record, Dialogue Act, Knowledge Representation.

Abstract: Negotiation is a strategic discussion that resolves an issue in a way that both parties find acceptable. Specific

forms of negotiation are used in many situations, among them in parliamentary discussions. In this paper we

report on a pilot study on verbatim records of sittings held in the Estonian Parliament. The structure of the

discussions will be represented by using the dialogue acts of a custom-made typology. It will be compared

with the structure of negotiation in everyday life. Our further aim is to create means for automatically

recognizing the structure and analysing the contents of parliamentary negotiations and political arguments.

To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model Estonian political discussions.

1 INTRODUCTION

Negotiation is a communication whereby parties who

have opposing interests discuss the form of any joint

action that they might take to manage and ultimately

resolve the dispute between them (Dispute, 2017).

Specific forms of negotiation are used in many

situations: international affairs, the legal system,

government, industrial disputes or domestic

relationships as examples (Negotiation).

Parliamentary speech has always been in the

centre of the humanitarian and societal interest with

its influential language and content for the policy

making as well as for the social and political

environment (Working, 2017). The empirical study of

parliamentary discourse contributes to an

understanding of how policy issues are framed.

Studying parliamentary discourse can also be related

to comparative assessments of the deliberative

performance of different parliaments (Bara et al.,

2007).

In the current paper we present an approach to

modelling the discussions held in the Estonian

Parliament (Riigikogu) based on the verbatim records

of the sittings. In the records, repetitions and

disﬂuencies are omitted, while supplementary

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7318-087X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1123-7252

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7412-7168

information such as speaker names are added. We are

looking for the general structure of the discussions

including negotiations on motions where arguments

and counterarguments are presented. To our

knowledge, it is the first attempt to model Estonian

political discussions.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2

describes the related work. In Section 3, we examine

two randomly selected discussions by using verbatim

records of sittings – one from 1992 when the

Riigikogu has newly started its sessions after the

restitution of the Republic of Estonia, and another

from 2018. We represent the structure of both

discussions as a sequence of dialogue acts. In Section

4 we concentrate on the descriptive analysis of these

structures with the aim of establishing the similarities

and differences between them. These data can be used

for interpreting the changes in Estonian parliamentary

(political) discussions during the period under

consideration. Section 4 considers some problems

related to these structures, finding out the similarities

and differences between them. We also compare the

structure of the parliamentary negotiations with the

structure of everyday negotiation of two people.

Section 5 draws conclusions and figures out the future

work.

Koit, M., Õim, H. and Roosmaa, T.

How Do the Members of a Parliament Negotiate? Analysing Verbatim Records.

DOI: 10.5220/0008345303290335

In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2019), pages 329-335

ISBN: 978-989-758-382-7

329

2 RELATED WORK

There are many ongoing initiatives for compiling

digital collections of parliament data (Workshop,

2017). The parliament-focused corpora are for

example, EuroParl – a multilingual parallel corpus of

the sessions of the European Parliament in 1996–

2011, Hansard corpus that includes speeches given in

the British Parliament from 1803-2005, speech data

from the Czech parliament, the Talk of Norway

corpus – a collection of proceedings from the

Norwegian parliament, etc. Recent CLARIN-PLUS

survey on parliament data has identified over 20

corpora of parliamentary records, with over half of

them being available within the CLARIN

infrastructure. “It is urgent to gather researchers

producing parliamentary corpora and making them

available, in order to share methods and approaches

of compiling, annotating and exploring them”

(ParlaClarin, 2018).

Parliamentary debates are an important resource

because they contain impactful information and

special, formalized and often persuasive and

emotional language. The data can be used for

linguistic, historical, political, sociological etc.

research.

Bara et al., (2007) compare two approaches, one

semi-automated (Hamlet) and the other fully

automated (Alceste), when analysing debate from the

UK House of Commons on a private member’s bill

on abortion in 1966. The authors conclude that both

techniques have produced results which are pertinent

to the study of deliberation set within a parliamentary

context and that each of them has particular strengths.

The review of Atkinson et al., (2015) considers

the development of artiﬁcial tools that capture the

human ability to argue. Such systems can be used

when modelling political argumentation being able

automatically extract arguments and relations

between them.

Bunt et al., (2015) analyse plenary sessions in the

UK Youth Parliament and apply the information state

update approach to tracking and understanding the

argumentative behaviour of participants in a

parliamentary debate, in order to predict its outcome.

The paper of van Aggelen et al., (2017) describes

the design, generation and use of LinkedEP, an RDF

translation of the verbatim proceedings of the plenary

sessions of the European Parliament, including links

to four other datasets.

Vilares (2017) presents a model to analyse what is

going on in political debates, without relying on any

labelled data and assuming the perspectives of a topic

to be latent. It is implemented through a hierarchical

Bayesian model.

Abercrombie and Batista-Navarro (2018)

annotate Hansard debates with sentiment tags,

creating a novel corpus (HanDeSeT) for use in the

evaluation of automatic parliamentary speech-level

sentiment analysis systems. These consist of

proposed motions and the associated speeches of

Members of the House.

Venkata et al., (2018) analyse a dataset of

synopsis of Indian parliamentary debates. They

develop a generic software parser for the conversion

of unstructured pdf files into structured format, i.e.

into a relational database. They analyse the purpose

of the speeches of the members of parliament and

categorize them into four categories. They also

present the results on binary stance classiﬁcation of

the speeches whether the member is in favour of the

debate topic or not.

A new series of workshops (ParlaClarin) are being

conducted to encourage research in parliamentary

debates for better harmonization, interoperability and

comparability of the resources and tools relevant for

the study of parliamentary discussions and decisions,

not only in Europe but worldwide.

3 TWO CASE STUDIES

In the following, we analyse the verbatim records of

some discussions held in the Parliament of Estonia.

Our aim is to figure out the structure of discussions

on a topic and represent it by a sequence of dialogue

acts.

3.1 Empirical Material

Our empirical material is formed by the records of the

Parliament of Estonia – Riigikogu (cf. Riigikogu). An

important task of the Riigikogu is the passing of acts

and resolutions. Acts are the result of work in

multiple stages. The first stage of legislation involves

the drafting of a bill (a draft act). During the second

stage, the bill is initiated in the Riigikogu. The bill

will then pass three readings (in some cases two),

during which it is refined and amended. The

proceeding of a bill is managed by the relevant

leading committee. After having been passed by the

Riigikogu, the act is sent to the President of the

Republic for proclamation, and is then published in

State Gazette.

Verbatim records of the sittings of the Riigikogu

(in Estonian) are accessible on the Web as pdf files.

A corpus is formed that includes a part of the records

KEOD 2019 - 11th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development

330

from 1995 to 2001 (in total, 13 million tokens), both

for download and on-line searching (Koondkorpus:

Riigikogu). For the current study, however, we have

randomly chosen two items outside of the corpus –

one from the sittings in 1992 when the Riigikogu has

newly started after the restitution of the Republic of

Estonia, and another from 2018. The first item

considers the draft act on animal protection (it passed

two readings) and another – on social care (three

readings). Both debates end after voting with

adopting of the acts by the members of Riigikogu

(MPs).

In our study, we are looking for the structure of

the debates held in the Riigikogu and especially, of

negotiations as parts of these debates where

arguments for and against a motion are presented. To

do so, we have annotated the records under

consideration by using a custom-made dialogue act

(DA) system that is based on Conversation Analysis

(Sidnell and Stivers, 2012).

The typology was worked out and has been used

for annotation of DAs in Estonian dialogues before

the ISO 24617-2 standard has been approved (Bunt et

al., 2017). In the used typology, the DAs are divided

into two groups – (1) adjacency pair (AP) acts where

the first pair part expects a certain second pair part

(like question–answer), and (2) non-AP acts which do

not expect any response (like giving additional

information which was not asked for). Names of the

DAs consist of two parts separated by a colon: the

first two letters give an abbreviation of the name of

an act-group, e.g. QU – QUestion, AI – Additional

Information. The third letter is used only for AP acts –

the first (F) or the second (S) pair part of an AP. The

second part is the proper name of the act. There are

acts like QUF: Wh-question, QUS: Giving

information, AI: Justification, etc. The total number of

the acts is 126. An overview of the typology is given

in Appendix. Custom-made software has been used

for semi-automatic annotation carried out by the

authors of this paper.

As a rule, one DA corresponds to every sentence

but when annotating, any presented report as a part of

a discussion was considered as a whole, no DAs were

annotated inside. Still, both the DA system and the

tool have been designed for annotation of the

Estonian human-human spoken dialogues therefore

many manual corrections have been needed when

annotating the parliamentary records.

However, we plan to go over to the ISO standard

in our future work. The aim is to make our research

better comparable with other studies.

3.2 Animal Protection: The General

Structure of Parliamentary Debate

in 1992

The first analysed bill (from 1992) considers the

conditions of handling domestic animals, their

killing, stray animals, etc (cf. Riigikogu). It has been

initiated by the Minister of Environment.

The meetings are chaired by the President of

Riigikogu. The 1

reading starts with the report of the

leading committee. The presenter asserts that the bill

has been worked out by a specialist who is not a

member of the committee but he will make a co-

report. Then, questions are asked by the MPs and

answered by the presenter. For example: Is the bill

approved by the veterinary service? Are there some

rules for ritual killing? The co-presentation of the

specialist follows. Again, questions are asked by the

MPs and answered by the co-presenter. Not only

questions but motions to amend are made by MPs,

e.g. Some adjustments are needed in this paragraph

– indicate who exactly will do the proposed actions.

After the 1

reading, the amendments concerning the

bill have to be delivered to the leading committee in

the written form.

The 2

reading starts with the report of the

leading committee on the amendments which whether

have been accepted or not by the committee and on

the changes that were introduced into the bill. Then

questions are asked by the MPs and answered by the

presenter, e.g. Who is responsible for solving the

problem of stray dogs? Now the negotiation starts

where arguments and counterarguments are given for

and against the introduced corrections. New

amendments are also proposed, e.g. I propose to add

an explanation to §8 related to torture of animals by

infants. After the negotiation, a break is announced

by the Chair in order to introduce the final corrections

into the bill. After the break, a report is presented by

the leading committee on the accepted amendments.

The authors of the amendments not accepted have the

right to request voting (but nobody does it request in

this case). Finally, a voting follows where the MPs

adopt the act.

The general structure of the discussions is

represented in Fig.1. As said before, we consider any

presented report as a whole and do not annotate the

DAs that it includes. The authors of turns are given in

italics. MP, MP

, MP

is any member of Riigikogu.

The winding brackets connect a part that can be

repeated; round brackets connect a part that can be

missed; ’/’ separates alternative dialogue acts; ‘+’

marks multifunctional acts; ’- -’ starts a comment.

How Do the Members of a Parliament Negotiate? Analysing Verbatim Records

331

- - 1

reading

- - initiator of the draft Act – Minister

Presenter – a member of the leading committee Report

{

MP QUF: Wh-question/ DIF: Proposal

Presenter QUS: Giving information (PS: Giving information/

AI: Justification)

}

Co-presenter – author of the draft Act Report

{

MP QUF: Wh-question/ Yes-no question/ DIF: Proposal

Co-presenter QUS: Giving information

}

- - break, presenting the amendment proposals to the leading

committee in written form

- - 2

reading

Presenter – a member of the leading committee Report

{

MP QUF: Wh-question/ Yes-no question/ DIF: Proposal

Presenter QUS: Giving information

}

- - negotiation

{

OPF: Assertion/ Opinion / DIF: Proposal/ PS: Giving

information/ AI: Justification - - argument

OPS/DIS: Accept/Reject/ OPF: Assertion/ Opinion/ PS:

Giving information/ AI: Justification - - argument

}

- - break; introducing the corrections into text

Presenter – a member of the leading committee Report about

the corrections made

(- - voting on amendment motions)

- - final voting

Figure 1: The structure of discussions in 1992. The winding

brackets ’{’ and ’}’ connect a part that can be repeated;

round brackets connect a part that can be missed; ’/’

separates alternative DAs; ‘+’ marks multifunctional DAs;

’- -’ starts a comment. MP, MP

, MP

– any member of

Riigikogu.

3.3 Social Care: The General Structure

of Parliamentary Debate in 2018

The second analysed bill (from 2018) considers

introducing the changes into the valid law on social

care (cf. Riigikogu). It is initiated by the Government.

The aim is to create an additional supporting system

for youth security. The reason to introduce the

changes is that the rate of unemployed young people

is twice greater than the average unemployment.

The 1

reading starts with the report of the

Minister. He presents several arguments for the

planned changes, e.g. They are needed to better

perform the tasks proposed by the European

Committee; Early intervention helps to involve the

passive young people who are neither working nor

learning. After that, questions are asked by the MPs

and answered by the presenter. Then, a presentation

of the leading committee follows where an overview

of the discussion is given that took place in the

committee. Again, questions are asked and answered,

e.g. Do the changes increase the workload of

officials? – Yes, but a compensation will be granted.

- - 1

reading

- - initiator – Government

Presenter – Minister Report

{

MP QUF: Wh-question / Yes-no question/ PS: Giving

information/ AI: Specification/ Explication/ Justification

Presenter QUS: Giving information

}

Co-presenter – a member of leading committee Report

{

MP QUF: Wh-question

Co-presenter QUS: Giving information

}

- - negotiation

{

OPF: Assertion/ Opinion - - argument

OPS: Accept/ Reject + OPF: Assertion/ Opinion/ PS:

Giving information/ AI: Specification/ Explication/ Justification

- - argument

}

- - 2

reading

Presenter – a member of leading committee Report

{

MP QUF: Wh-question/ OPF: Assertion/ Opinion

Presenter QUS: Giving information + OPS: Accept/ Reject

}

- - negotiation

{

OPF: Assertion/ Opinion/ DIF: Proposal/ PS: Giving

information/ AI: Specification/ Explication/ Justification

- - argument

OPS: Accept / Reject + OPF: Assertion / Opinion/ DIS:

Accept/ Reject - - argument

}

- - voting on amendment motions

- - 3

reading

- - negotiation

{

OPF: Assertion/ Opinion/ DIF: Proposal - - argument

OPS: Accept/ Reject + OPF: Assertion/ Opinion / DIS:

Accept/ Reject - - argument

}

- - chair announces the final voting

- - voting

Figure 2: The structure of discussions in 2018. The winding

brackets connect a part that can be repeated; round brackets

connect a part that can be missed; ’/’ separates alternative

DAs; ‘+’ marks multifunctional DAs; ’- -’ starts a comment.

MP, MP

, MP

– any member of Riigikogu.

Negotiation is announced by the Chair on the general

principles of the bill. Here, arguments for and against

are presented, e.g. The changes will intervene into

private life; We (social democrats) definitely support

the changes. Between the 1

and 2

readings, written

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amendments concerning the bill are transferred to the

leading committee.

The 2

reading starts with the report of the

leading committee about the amendments accepted or

not. Questions are asked and answered, e.g. Why we

must change the valid law for the pilot project? – This

pilot project is impossible without a law. Negotiation

follows where arguments for and against are given

concerning the amendments.

The corrected text of the bill has been distributed

to the MPs before the next reading. The last, 3

reading starts with negotiation. Again, arguments and

counterarguments for/against the draft act are

proposed, e.g. We can’t support pursuing of young

people; Tax free service for people who need help

should be approved. Finally, the Chair announces the

final voting and the act will be adopted by the MPs.

Fig.2 represents the general structure of the

discussions.

4 DISCUSSION

Some preliminary inferences can be drawn from the

analysis. When comparing the structure of the

analysed items we can conclude that during the years,

our Riigikogu has refined its work. In 1992, the act

was approved after two readings while three readings

were needed in 2018. The record from 1992 includes

5,824 running words while the one from 2018 –

14,662. The number of questions asked (and

answered) also has increased. In 1992, from one to

five questions have been asked after every presented

report on the considered item but in 2018 – from four

to fifteen. When comparing the structure and contents

of negotiations, we can summarize that the general

structure is similar in discussions on both topics but

the number of the presented arguments is bigger in

the negotiations in 2018 than 1992 (respectively,

eight and three). In both years, motions to amend

were put to voting. In 1992, MP who has made the

amendment did not request voting. In 2018, on the

contrary, all the amendments have been voted. We

can see how the political culture improved during the

years – the MPs are now more informed and self-

conscious.

However, in order to draw general inferences, a

thoroughgoing analysis will be needed. This remains

for the future research.

In our previous paper, we have analysed the

structure of everyday face-to-face negotiations taken

from the Estonian Dialogue Corpus (Koit, 2016).

There are two participants (A and B) involved in

negotiations. A makes a proposal to B to do an action.

Then arguments for and against will be presented by

the participants and finally, a decision will be made

by B – accept or not the proposal. The typical

structure of the negotiation is presented in Fig.3.

As expected, in parliamentary negotiations, the

situation is more complicated. It is multi-party event,

i.e. all MPs can have a floor when negotiating a

motion (i.e. the proposal that has been considered in

a preceding report). In the report, arguments for the

motion are also given (but we currently do not

annotate them). Arguments for and against presented

in negotiation are not single DAs but always

sequences of DAs where information is repeated,

justified and explained. In the two analysed cases,

arguments for the motion are prevailing over the

counterarguments and both acts are approved.

A DIF: Proposal

(PS: Giving information/ AI: Justification - -argument)

- - negotiation

{

B DIF: Request/ QUF: Wh question / OPF: Assertion

(PS: Giving information/ AI: Justification - - argument)

A DIS: Giving information/ OPS: Reject + OPF: Assertion

(PS: Giving information/ AI: Justification - -argument)

}

- - decision

B DIS: Accept/ Deferral/ DIS: Reject

Figure 3: The structure of everyday negotiation (A makes a

proposal to B to do an action). The winding brackets

connect a part that can be repeated; round brackets connect

a part that can be missed; ’/’ separates alternatives; ‘+’

marks multifunctional acts; ’- -’ starts a comment.

The inner structure of arguments presented in

parliamentary negotiations needs an additional study.

An argument is made of three parts: a set of premises

representing the reason, a conclusion representing the

supported claim, and a link showing how the premises

lead to the conclusion (Amgoud et al., 2015).

However, the automatic recognition of DAs and

arguments in Estonian parliamentary discourse

remains for the further work.

The approach introduced in this research can be

applied also for the study of parliamentary

discussions in other languages where DAs are

annotated. It is challenging to compare the structure

of negotiations in order to draw conclusions about the

similarities and differences between the political

discussions in different countries and cultures.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Verbatim records of sittings of the Parliament of

Estonia were considered in the paper. This is a

How Do the Members of a Parliament Negotiate? Analysing Verbatim Records

333

preliminary study where two occasionally chosen

items are analysed – one from 1992 when the

Parliament newly started its work after the restitution

of the Republic of Estonia, and another from 2018.

We established the general structure of the

discussions on both items (animal protection and

social care, respectively) and represented them by

using the dialogue acts of a custom-made typology.

We compared the two structures and concluded that

although they are similar, in 2018 the discussion was

much longer and more exhaustive. This is not

surprising because, first, a large number of new laws

had to be adopted in 90ties, and second, the

Parliament had rather little experience in legislation.

The structure of parliamentary negotiation has been

compared with the structure of everyday negotiation.

Still, we are aware that exhaustive analysis of more

empirical material is needed in order to draw general

inferences about the structure and changes in political

discussions.

The further work will be concentrated on the

automatic analysis of the structure of Estonian

parliamentary discussions and the recognition of

political arguments.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by institutional research

funding IUT (20-56) of the Estonian Ministry of

Education and Research, and by the European Union

through the European Regional Development Fund

(Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies).

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parliamentary-records

APPENDIX OVERVIEW OF THE

USED DIALOGUE ACT

TYPOLOGY

I. Adjacency Pair (AP) Acts

Dialogue Managing Acts

1. Conventional (ritual) acts (greeting, thanking,

etc.), e.g. RIF: Greeting, RIS: Greeting, RIF:

Wish, RIS: Thanking.

2. Topic change acts (are used to start a new topic or

sub-topic), e.g. TCF: Initiation, TCS: Accept.

3. Contact control acts (typically occur in phone

conversations and are used as formulas that can be

presented as lists), e.g. CCF: Initiation, CCS:

Confirmation).

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4. Adjusting the conditions of answer (ACF:

Adjusting the conditions of answer, ACS:

Adjusting the conditions of answer).

Repair Acts

5. Repairs initiated and made by different

participants, e.g. RPF: Non-understanding, RPS:

Repair.

Information Acts

6. Directives and grants (request, proposal, offer,

etc.), e.g. DIF: Request, DIS: Giving information.

7. Questions and answers, e.g. QUF: Wh-question,

QUS: Giving information.

8. Opinions and responses (assertion, opinion, etc.),

e.g. OPF: Assertion, OPS: Accept, OPS: Reject.

II. Non-Adjacency Pair (non-AP) Acts

Dialogue Managing Acts

1. Conventional (contact, call, etc.), e.g. RS:

Introduce.

Repair Acts

2. Repairs initiated and made by the same person, e.g.

RP: Self-repair.

Information Acts

3. Primary single acts (narration, promise, giving

information, etc.), e.g. PS: Giving information.

4. Additional information (specification,

explanation, justification, etc.), e.g. AI:

Specification.

5. Voluntary responses (continuer,

acknowledgement, etc.), e.g. VR: Neutral

continuer.

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