BUNDESTAG-MINE: Natural Language Processing for Extracting Key Information from Government Documents

Abstract

As governments worldwide continue to release vast amounts of textual information, the need for efficient and insightful tools to extract, interpret and present this data has become increasingly critical. Towards solving this issue, we present the BUNDESTAG-MINE: an environment that periodically retrieves pertinent data from the German parliament, parses and analyzes it using pipelines for natural language processing, and then displays the results in a web application that is publicly accessible. BUNDESTAG-MINE helps to extract key information from parliamentary documents in a visually appealing matter for many use cases. For instance, the tool can be leveraged by journalists for news detection, lawyers for compliance checking, linguists for discourse analysis, and the broad public to inform themselves about the positions of political party members on a topic.