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.
(The paper versions above have clearly marked changes from the proceedings version)@inproceedings{Thomas+Pang+Lee:06a, author = {Matt Thomas and Bo Pang and Lillian Lee}, title = {Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from {Congressional} floor-debate transcripts}, year = {2006}, pages = {327--335}, booktitle = {Proceedings of EMNLP} }
This paper is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. IIS-0329064, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship funds. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or official policies, either expressed or implied, of any sponsoring institutions, the U.S. government, or any other entity.