Datasets:
Modalities:
Text
Formats:
csv
Languages:
English
Size:
10M - 100M
ArXiv:
Tags:
political-discourse
parliamentary-debates
argument-mining
stance-detection
domain-specific
pretraining
License:
Update README.md
Browse files
README.md
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license: cc-by-nc-nd-4.0
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---
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---
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language:
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- en
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license: cc-by-nc-nd-4.0
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pretty_name: PoliticalDebatesCorpus-EN — English Political Debates Corpus
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size_categories:
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- 10B<n<100B
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task_categories:
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- text-generation
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- fill-mask
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- text-classification
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tags:
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- political-discourse
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- parliamentary-debates
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- argument-mining
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- stance-detection
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- domain-specific
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- pretraining
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---
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# RooseDebates: English Political Debates Corpus
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PoliticalDebatesCorpus-EN is a large-scale English corpus of political debate and speech transcripts,
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assembled for domain-specific language model pre-training. It is the training corpus behind
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**RooseBERT**, a language model tailored to the dialogic and argumentative nature of political
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debates. The corpus brings together televised presidential debates and parliamentary debates
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from multiple countries and international bodies, totalling **~11 GB** of text and spanning the
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period **1946–2025**.
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## Dataset Summary
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- **Total size:** ~11 GB of cleaned English text
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- **Time span:** 1946–2025
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- **Domain:** Political debates, parliamentary sessions, presidential debates, UN debates
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- **Languages:** English
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- **Source types:** Televised exchanges, parliamentary debates, primary/general election debates
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- **Intended use:** Pre-training and fine-tuning of language models for political discourse analysis
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All sources originate from authoritative speakers and official political settings, where
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political decisions are discussed, contested, and communicated to the public.
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## Supported Tasks
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The corpus was designed to support domain-adaptive pre-training for downstream tasks including:
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- **Stance detection** (support / oppose toward a target)
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- **Sentiment analysis** of debate speeches
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- **Argument component detection and classification** (claims vs. premises)
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- **Argument relation prediction and classification** (support / attack / no-relation)
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- **Motion policy classification**
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- **Named entity recognition (NER)**
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## Data Sources
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The corpus combines existing curated collections with transcripts scraped from official debate
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websites. Each source was pre-processed to remove hyperlinks and markup tags and to collapse
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multiple spaces.
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| Source | Coverage | Period | Size |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| African Parliamentary Debates (HOME Project) | Ghana & South Africa | 1999–2024 | 573 MB |
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| Australian Parliamentary Debates | Australia | 1998–2025 | 1 GB |
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| Canadian Parliamentary Debates (OpenParliament) | Canada | 1994–2025 | 1.1 GB |
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| European Parliamentary Debates (EUSpeech) | EU leaders & institutions | 2007–2015 | 110 MB |
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| Irish Parliamentary Debates (ParlEE + Dáil Éireann DB) | Ireland | 1919–2019 | ~3.4 GB |
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| New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (ParlSpeech) | New Zealand | 1987–2019 | 791 MB |
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| Scottish Parliamentary Debates (ParlScot) | Scotland | until 2021 | 443 MB |
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| UK Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons) | United Kingdom | 1979–2019 | 2.6 GB |
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| UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) | UN General Assembly | 1946–2023 | 186 MB |
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| UN Security Council Debates (UNSC) | UN Security Council | 1992–2023 | 387 MB |
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| United States Debates (American Presidency Project) | United States | 1960–2024 | 16 MB |
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## Pre-processing
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Each dataset was cleaned with a uniform pipeline:
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1. Removal of hyperlinks and markup tags
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2. Collapsing of multiple consecutive whitespace characters
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3. Merging of per-source splits into a unified corpus with balanced representation across sources
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## Intended Uses & Limitations
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**Intended uses.** Pre-training or continued pre-training of encoder-based language models for
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political discourse analysis; fine-tuning on stance, sentiment, argument mining, and policy
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classification tasks.
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**Limitations.**
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- The corpus is **English-only** and skewed toward Commonwealth and U.S./UN sources, so
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geographic and linguistic coverage is uneven.
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- Transcripts reflect the political opinions and rhetoric of the speakers; the corpus is **not**
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a neutral source and may contain biased, adversarial, or offensive language.
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- Time coverage varies by source, which may introduce period-specific framing effects.
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- Models trained on this data should not be treated as authoritative on factual political claims.
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## Licensing
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This corpus aggregates multiple underlying datasets, each released under its own terms by its
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original authors. **Users must review and comply with the license of each constituent source**
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before redistribution or commercial use. The aggregation and accompanying card are released
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under CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0; this does not override the licenses of the individual sources.
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## Citation
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If you use this dataset, please cite us:
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```bibtex
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@article{dore2025roosebert,
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title={RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling},
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author={Dore, Deborah and Cabrio, Elena and Villata, Serena},
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journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.03250},
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year={2025}
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}
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```
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Please also cite the original sources of the constituent datasets where appropriate (see the
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**Data Sources** table and the references in the paper).
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## Contact
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Deborah Dore - deborah.dore@cnrs.fr
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