UN General Debates

Context:

Every year since 1947, representatives of UN member states gather at the annual sessions of the United Nations General Assembly. The centrepiece of each session is the General Debate. This is a forum at which leaders and other senior officials deliver statements that present their government’s perspective on the major issues in world politics. These statements are akin to the annual legislative state-of-the-union addresses in domestic politics. This dataset, the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), includes the corpus of texts of General Debate statements from 1970 (Session 25) to 2016 (Session 71).

Content:

This dataset includes the text of each country’s statement from the general debate, separated by country, session and year and tagged for each. The text was scanned from PDFs of transcripts of the UN general sessions. As a result, the original scans included page numbers in the text from OCR (Optical character recognition) scans, which have been removed. This dataset only includes English.

Acknowledgements:

This dataset was prepared by Alexander Baturo, Niheer Dasandi, and Slava Mikhaylov, and is presented in the paper "Understanding State Preferences With Text As Data: Introducing the UN General Debate Corpus" Research & Politics, 2017.

Inspiration:

This dataset includes over forty years of data from different countries, which allows for the exploration of differences between countries and over time. This allows you to ask both country-specific and longitudinal questions. Some questions that might be interesting:

• How has the sentiment of each country’s general debate changed over time?
• What topics have been more or less popular over time and by region?
• Can you build a classifier which identifies which country a given text is from?
• Are there lexical or syntactic changes over time or differences between region?
• How does the latitude of a country affect lexical complexity?