Parliamentary words collated in new web tool

Glasgow University has today launched a new online resource which allows people to easily source political speeches and chamber quips at Westminster from 1803-2005.

The SAMUELS project (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches) tool is being used by linguistics experts at the University to measure how UK Parliamentary language has changed over the past 200 years.

The programme, which is free to use, contains all 7.6 million speeches and 1.6 billion words from parliament’s official report Hansard but makes it easier to search for phrases and determine the most common words used.

For example ‘strike’ and ‘negotiation’ were among the most commonly-used words by Margaret Thatcher, while Tony Blair’s most common speech keywords were ‘troop’, ‘euro’, ‘summit’, and ‘pensioner’.

The late Rev Ian Paisley mentioned ‘carpets’ more often in Parliament than ‘God’.

“No-one can possibly read all 1.6 billion words, so what our team has done is develop all sorts of new ways of digging into that information and letting people search for it,” said Dr Marc Alexander, Director of Historical Thesaurus of English at the University of Glasgow, who is lead investigator.

He said he hoped the tool would open up parliament “in a different way” to Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up parliament 410 years ago today.

Other interesting facts include: Labour’s Dennis Skinner is the MP recorded as being told to “shut up” the most in Parliament and Shakespeare gets a mention 5,938 times, while Robert Burns is mentioned 428 times.