Christoph Leonhardt, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Biography

Christoph Leonhardt is a political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His work is situated at the intersection of political science and computational social science. Aside from a general focus on the preparation and analysis of textual data in social science research, his current research particularly addresses the possibility of linking textual data with other kinds of data commonly used in social science research (Linking Textual Data, https://www.konsortswd.de/en/services/research/data-management-software/linking-textual-data/). As part of the PolMine research group (https://polmine.github.io) led by Professor Andreas Blätte, he, among other things, contributes to the preparation of GermaParl, a large and comprehensively annotated corpus of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag (https://zenodo.org/records/12794676). Prior research includes the preparation and analysis of textual data in the context of migration and integration research and research on populist parties in parliament with computational methods.

Visiting Fellowship 1.-15. October

Motivaton

Deepening already existing contacts to members of the Institute of Contemporary History, in particular originating from the international context of CLARIN, and establishing new scientific links is a great motivation for this visiting fellowship. Closer cooperation, especially with the institute’s Digital Humanities research program, will strengthen joint efforts toward the shared goals of advancing data and tools for substantial analyses. As a particular goal, my stay in Ljubljana will focus on the further advancement of the GermaParl corpus of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag. Working on the improved interoperability of the resource by implementing it in a more standardized format (ParlaMint) during the fellowship allows for a close exchange of ideas and insights with experts in the field in Ljubljana. Ultimately, this will further the interoperability and comparability of the resource and foster additional research on parliamentary debates in a comparative perspective.

Bibliography (selection)

Leonhardt, Christoph, and Andreas Blätte. 2024. “The dbpedia R Package: An Integrated Workflow for Entity Linking (for ParlaMint Corpora).” In Proceedings of the IV Workshop on Creating, Analysing, and Increasing Accessibility of Parliamentary Corpora (ParlaCLARIN) @ LREC-COLING 2024, eds. Darja Fišer, Maria Eskevich, and David Bordon. Torino, Italia: ELRA and ICCL, 133- 44. https://aclanthology.org/2024.parlaclarin-1.20

Leonhardt, Christoph, and Andreas Blätte. 2023. “Evaluating the Quality of the GermaParl Corpus of Plenary Protocols (v2.0.0).” In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences, eds. Christopher Klamm et al. Ingolstadt, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics, 88-100. https://aclanthology.org/2023.cpss-1.9

Blätte, Andreas, Julia Rakers, and Christoph Leonhardt. 2022. “How GermaParl Evolves: Improving Data Quality by Reproducible Corpus Preparation and User Involvement.” In Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, eds. Darja Fišer, Maria Eskevich, Jakob Lenardič, and Franciska de Jong. Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association, 7-15. https://aclanthology.org/2022.parlaclarin-1.2