Get out the vote: Determining support or opposition from Congressional floor-debate transcripts
نویسندگان
چکیده
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.
منابع مشابه
Collective Classification of Congressional Floor-Debate Transcripts
This paper explores approaches to sentiment classification of U.S. Congressional floordebate transcripts. Collective classification techniques are used to take advantage of the informal citation structure present in the debates. We use a range of methods based on local and global formulations and introduce novel approaches for incorporating the outputs of machine learners into collective classi...
متن کاملUsing Multiple Sources of Agreement Information for Sentiment Classification of Political Transcripts
Sentiment classifiers attempt to determine whether a document expresses a generally positive or negative sentiment about its topic. Previous work has shown that overall performance can be improved by combining per-document classifications with information about agreement between documents. This paper explores approaches to sentiment classification of U.S Congressional floor debate transcripts t...
متن کاملLanguage and gender in Congressional speech
This study draws from a large corpus of Congressional speeches from the 101st to the 110th Congress (1989–2008), to examine gender differences in language use in a setting of political debates. Female legislators’ speeches demonstrated characteristics of both a feminine language style (e.g. more use of emotion words, fewer articles) and a masculine one (e.g. more nouns and long words, fewer per...
متن کاملSocial influence and political mobilization: Further evidence from a randomized experiment in the 2012 U.S. presidential election
A large-scale experiment during the 2010 U.S. Congressional Election demonstrated a positive effect of an online get-out-the-vote message on real world voting behavior. Here, we report results from a replication of the experiment conducted during the U.S. Presidential Election in 2012. In spite of the fact that get-out-the-vote messages typically yield smaller effects during high-stakes electio...
متن کاملThe Class Action Fairness Act in Perspective: the Old and the New in Federal Jurisdictional Reform
The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) was the product of an extended and well-organized political campaign. In Congress, its passage required a grinding eight-year effort, several modifications to the original proposal, numerous committee hearings, multiple reports by both Houses, political compromises that drew some Democratic support, two unsuccessful attempts to terminate debate in th...
متن کامل