Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from Congressional floor-debate transcripts

Abstract

We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the fact that these speeches occur as part of a discussion; this allows us to use sources of information regarding relationships between discourse segments, such as whether a given utterance indicates agreement with the opinion expressed by another. We find that the incorporation of such information yields substantial improvements over classifying speeches in isolation.

Proceedings of EMNLP 2006. This revision (created Dec 2006) contains clearly-marked updates from the proceedings version. Data available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/data/convote.html

References in corpus (2)

• Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech
• Seeing stars: Exploiting class relationships for sentiment categorization with respect to rating scales

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