Questions and Answers in Parliamentary Discussions: Form and Functions

Mare Koit

2021

Abstract

The study is aimed to develop the Estonian parliamentary corpus. The existing morphologically analyzed corpus includes verbatim records of sessions held in the Parliament of Estonia in 1995-2001. An important task of the Parliament is the passing of acts and resolutions. Every reading of a bill starts with a speech of a minister and/or of a member of the responsible leading committee. Then members of the Parliament can ask questions which will be answered by the presenter. The paper concentrates on the questions and answers that have been annotated in the corpus according to a custom-made dialogue act annotation scheme as well as the ISO standard. For comparison, questions and answers when reading a bill in the UK Parliament are considered. Different forms of questions and answers with different functions are prevailing in both parliaments. The main function of questions in the Parliament of Estonia is to get information. On the contrary, in the UK Parliament the questions mainly are used to present arguments for or against the bill. The main function of answers is to provide information in the Parliament of Estonia but agreement or disagreement with arguments in the UK Parliament. Our further aim is the automatic analysis of Estonian political texts and comparison with political discourse in other parliaments.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Koit M. (2021). Questions and Answers in Parliamentary Discussions: Form and Functions. In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2021) - Volume 2: KEOD; ISBN 978-989-758-533-3, SciTePress, pages 186-193. DOI: 10.5220/0010665800003064

in Bibtex Style

@conference{keod21,
author={Mare Koit},
title={Questions and Answers in Parliamentary Discussions: Form and Functions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2021) - Volume 2: KEOD},
year={2021},
pages={186-193},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010665800003064},
isbn={978-989-758-533-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2021) - Volume 2: KEOD
TI - Questions and Answers in Parliamentary Discussions: Form and Functions
SN - 978-989-758-533-3
AU - Koit M.
PY - 2021
SP - 186
EP - 193
DO - 10.5220/0010665800003064
PB - SciTePress