Encoding Interruptions in Parliamentary Data: From Applause to Interjections and Laughter

Parliamentary data, especially parliamentary discourse, is of interest to researchers from various fields in the humanities and social sciences. The growing number of machine-readable and annotated parliamentary text corpora opens up this field for computer-based quantitative analysis. In this paper I aim to give an overview of how parliamentary interruptions are recorded in official parliamentary records and how they are modeled and encoded in currently available machine-readable parliamentary corpora. Furthermore, I will discuss whether these encodings are suitable for computer-based quantitative analysis of parliamentary interruptions. I will suggest detailed encodings of parliamentary interruptions in TEI as an extension to the Parla-CLARIN recommendations, to enable the extraction of parliamentary interruptions and to facilitate computerized quantitative analysis based on these encodings. As an example, I will use the encoding of interruptions in the Austrian Parliamentary Records.