Linking Parliamentary Minutes and Videos in the Japanese Diet

This paper offers an overview of the video retrieval system we have developed for the Japanese Diet. With our video retrieval system one can directly retrieve the video feed segment of interest, gain a visual understanding of the flow of parliamentary debate, and check the facial expressions and body language of the speaker. In this paper, we demonstrate how one can retrieve video streaming on user terminals that do not support Japanese language input, and suggest a variety of ways in which our video retrieval system can be utilized. Also, we report a preliminary analysis on the correspondence between the official minutes and the results of speech recognition of recordings of parliamentary meetings. We believe that our system encourages research on the utilization of visual information in policy-making and marks a step toward the provision of universal access to policy information. This work is supported by JSPS Kakenhi Grant Number 15H05727 and the Diet Archives Project funded by the GRIPS Policy Research Center. An earlier version (Masuyama 2016b) was presented at the 2016 General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, September 7-10, 2016.