There's Something New about the Italian Parliament: the IPSA Corpus

Parliamentary debates constitute a substantial and somewhat underutilized reservoir of publicly available written content. Despite their potential, the Italian parliamentary documents remain largely unexplored and most importantly inaccessible in their original paper-based form. In this paper we attempt to transform these valuable historical documents into IPSA, a digitally readable structured corpus containing speeches, reports of the Standing Committees, and law proposals spanning 175 years of Italian history, from the issuing of the Statuto Albertino in 1848, up to the present day. At first, the PDF documents, available on the official websites of Senato della Repubblica and Camera dei Deputati, the two chambers that form the Italian Parliament, are digitized using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. Then, the speeches are tagged with the corresponding speakers. The final dataset is released both in textual and structured format.