Reducing the Space and Time between Citizens and Parliament: Video Retrieval System for Diet Deliberations

We have been recently witnessing the steady increase of the government’s public information supply for citizens, as well as their success in launching electronic government projects. This information has enabled easier access for policy information to more people. Yet has such improvement in public information actually affected the ways in which we make policy decisions, and, if positive, in what way? By focusing on these questions, we examine the existing use of public information, and seek innovative ways to provide policy information with the help of the latest digital technology. Although many parliaments offer online video streaming of speech and debate, these video library systems merely provide us with the search engine to retrieve videos by the date and theme of parliamentary meetings. However, even if we successfully retrieve the parliamentary video we want, we need to watch the video from the beginning until we reach the speech or debate we are particularly interested in. In order to seek innovative ways to provide universal access to policy information, we have launched an internet video retrieval system for the Japanese Diet (http://gclip1.grips.ac.jp/video/). By using the latest sound recognition techniques to create timestamp data to match up parliamentary video feeds and the minutes of proceedings, our system makes it possible for one to retrieve the video clips corresponding to the minutes of the proceedings through a keyword search. With our video retrieval system for Diet deliberations, we can directly retrieve the moment of video feeds we are particularly interested in, visually understand the flow of parliamentary debate, and check the facial expression and body language of the speaker. By captioning the videos, our system can also offer alternative ways to utilize the parliamentary deliberation clips for those who have visual and hearing impairments. Since it is easy to share the URL identifying the moment of video feeds via SNS, our system has great potential to boost the usage of Diet deliberation videos by researchers as well as ordinary citizens. Our system is the world’s first attempt to retrieve parliamentary video streaming with a keyword search in the minutes of parliamentary proceedings, and expected to encourage discussion based on a better understanding of policy making in the Diet. In this paper, we offer an overview of the video retrieval system we have developed, and analyze the results of the keyword search to retrieve the video streaming at our web site. We also demonstrate how one can retrieve video streaming on user terminals that do not support Japanese language input. We believe that our endeavor sheds new light on the future development of parliamentary video streaming systems in other countries as well.