Using structured text corpora in Parliamentary Metadata Language for the analysis of legislative proceedings

This article examines the potential of employing structured texts, encoded in the Parliamentary Metadata Language XML schema, for the machine-readable analysis of substantial corpora of legislative proceedings. It demonstrates the potential of using PML corpora for combining the results of sentiment analysis with contextual metadata to establish and visualise patterns of divergent attitudes towards a topic such as immigration as they correlate with such features as party affiliation or geographic location. This is readily achieved using such simple techniques as XSLT transformations or XQUERY searches