Augmented Analysis of Parliamentary Debates

This paper delves into the SweTerror project’s use of word vectors to enhance the analysis of parliamentary debates concerning terrorism in Sweden during the electoral periods from 1968 to 2018. We focus on how word embeddings capture semantic shifts and the evolving context of key concepts like terror, terrorism, and extremism over time. By combining these computational tools with enriched metadata and document annotation as well as a mixedmethods and context-sensitive approach, we trace temporal changes in parliamentary discourse. The study demonstrates how generating vectors for distinct periods, such as electoral periods or parliamentary years, provides nuanced insights into conceptual transformations, including the introduction of the modern use of the concept of terrorism in the 1970s and the impact of the term violence-affirming extremism in the context of Islamism in the 2010s. We conclude by stressing that this approach allows for a more sophisticated analysis of linguistic and discursive patterns within Swedish parliamentary discourse.