Mentions of government and parliament members in a text are found by regular expression. At least three cases can be distinguished here.
- A single person is mentioned by name
- Multiple persons are mentioned by name
- A person is mentioned only by his/her function
In the first two cases, the strategy is to make use of highly regular address styles that are used in parliamentary speech, and thus also in the proceedings. Some examples (in translation) are: sir, madam, member, colleague, minister, and secretary of state. Such an address is immediately followed by a member's last name. The pattern that is used to find these names needs to span as much of the name as possible, without including any other subsequent words.