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

Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2006), pages 327–335, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from Congressional floor-debate transcripts Matt Thomas, Bo Pang, and Lillian Lee Department of Computer Science, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853-7501 mattthomas84@gmail.com, pabo@cs.cornell.edu, llee@cs.cornell.edu Abstract We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches repre- sent 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 re- lationships 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 im- provements over classifying speeches in isolation. 1 Introduction One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the de- cay of language, and that one can prob- ably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. — Orwell, “Politics and the English language” We have entered an era where very large amounts of politically oriented text are now avail- able online. This includes both official documents, such as the full text of laws and the proceedings of legislative bodies, and unofficial documents, such as postings on weblogs (blogs) devoted to politics. In some sense, the availability of such data is sim- ply a manifestation of a general trend of “every- body putting their records on the Internet”.1 The 1It is worth pointing out that the United States’ Library of Congress was an extremely early adopter of Web technology: the THOMAS database (http://thomas.loc.gov) of congres- online accessibility of politically oriented texts in particular, however, is a phenomenon that some have gone so far as to say will have a potentially society-changing effect. In the United States, for example, governmen- tal bodies are providing and soliciting political documents via the Internet, with lofty goals in mind: electronic rulemaking (eRulemaking) ini- tiatives involving the “electronic collection, dis- tribution, synthesis, and analysis of public com- mentary in the regulatory rulemaking process”, may “[alter] the citizen-government relationship” (Shulman and Schlosberg, 2002). Additionally, much media attention has been focused recently on the potential impact that Internet sites may have on politics2, or at least on political journalism3. Regardless of whether one views such claims as clear-sighted prophecy or mere hype, it is obvi- ously important to help people understand and an- alyze politically oriented text, given the impor- tance of enabling informed participation in the po- litical process. Evaluative and persuasive documents, such as a politician’s speech regarding a bill or a blog- ger’s commentary on a legislative proposal, form a particularly interesting type of politically oriented text. People are much more likely to consult such evaluative statements than the actual text of a bill or law under discussion, given the dense nature of legislative language and the fact that (U.S.) bills often …

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