C o C o HD : Congress Committee Hearing Dataset (2024)

Abstract: U.S. congressional hearings significantly influence the national economy and social fabric, impacting individual lives. Despite their importance, there is a lack of comprehensive datasets for analyzing these discourses. To address this, we propose the **Co**ngress **Co**mmittee **H**earing **D**ataset (CoCoHD), covering hearings from 1997 to 2024 across 86 committees, with 32,697 records. This dataset enables researchers to study policy language on critical issues like healthcare, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate justice. We demonstrate its potential with a case study on 1,000 energy-related sentences, analyzing the Energy and Commerce Committee’s stance on fossil fuel consumption. By fine-tuning pre-trained language models, we create energy-relevant measures for each hearing. Our market analysis shows that natural language analysis using CoCoHD can predict and highlight trends in the energy sector.

## introduction the united states congress, with its profound influence on the daily lives of millions of americans and global resonance, consists of two chambers: the house of representatives and the senate. the house of representatives has 435 members, with the number from each state determined by population, and members serve two-year terms. the house is responsible for initiating revenue bills and has the power to impeach federal officials. the senate, comprising 100 members with two from each state regardless of population, serves six-year terms and provides a more deliberative body. the senate has the authority to confirm presidential appointments, ratify treaties, and conduct impeachment trials. both chambers must pass a bill in corresponding author: ashah482@gatech.edu ♠ equal contribution 1 our dataset and code is available at https://github.c om/gtfintechlab/cocohd . identical form for it to become law, ensuring thorough scrutiny and representation of both local and statewide interests in the legislative process. in the mid-20th century, congressional hearings became crucial tools for both political parties to advance their agendas. congressional hearings are formal sessions where legislators gather evidence, question witnesses, and review government actions to inform policy decisions and ensure accountability. the advent of television and the internet further transformed these events into political theater, engaging wider audiences and fostering debates on significant issues important to the country. 2 we see this evident in the discussions on climate change. in 2023, the 118th united states congress held 156 hearings on climate, environment, and energy topics. 3 one of the most debated subjects was the inflation reduction act (ira), designed to make renewable energy and clean technologies more affordable. the ira has the potential to create over 9 million jobs in the next decade and has catalyzed over $49 billion in investment in clean energy technologies since august 2022. 4 these facts underscore congress's extensive influence on economic and social dynamics and the evident impact of legislation discussed in congressional hearings. the increased accessibility of congressional discussions has transformed the tone and format of hearings. politicians now aim to persuade not only those present but also remote audiences, enhancing public engagement in the legislative process. 5 as socioeconomic challenges grow more complex, hearings have become larger, longer, and more intricate. this complexity makes it difficult to fully track their development, leading to a significant knowledge gap between congressional activities and public understanding. bridging this gap requires resources and methods for large-scale analysis of the trends and issues discussed in these hearings. a comprehensive dataset and data-driven analyses will enable researchers, policymakers, and the public to systematically study congressional hearings, enhancing transparency, fostering informed discourse, and facilitating evidencebased decision-making on key legislative matters. this paper aims to promote research and analysis in natural language processing (nlp) applications for congressional hearings by introducing co-cohd (congress committee hearing dataset), the first and largest open-source dataset of its kind. cocohd comprises 32,697 curated hearing transcripts and metadata from 1997 to 2024, covering 86 congressional committees. as a demonstration, we present a novel task for quantifying fossil fuel-related sentiment in congressional hearings, focusing on the energy and commerce committee. we manually annotated sentences as relevant or irrelevant to energy production and further categorized relevant sentences as supportive, oppositional, or neutral toward fossil fuel production. by fine-tuning pre-trained language models with these annotations, we generalized this labeling process to all hearings from the committee, creating an inclination measure that quantifies each hearing's stance on fossil fuels versus clean energy. our subsequent market analysis showed that this measure could explain and predict trends in the energy sector, highlighting cocohd's potential to bridge the gap between congressional hearings and their real-world impact. beyond the energy sector, cocohd empowers researchers to explore language complexities in policy discussions on a wide range of critical issues, including immigration, climate change, racial justice, and lgbtq rights. ## cocohd dataset the congress committee hearing dataset contains details for 32,697 u.s. congress hearings held by the united states congress between january 1997 and january 2024, along with transcripts for 32,435 of those hearings. accompanied with each hearing is metadata pertaining to each hearing. in this section, we explain and describe the dataset's structure and our data collection process. ## applications our congressional hearing dataset is enriched with a diverse set of metadata, providing researchers the flexibility to easily combine multiple sources and tailor their analyses to specific research goals. in the following application section, we introduce three levels of analysis that can be conducted with our dataset. by cross-referencing existing literature, we demonstrate that our dataset is capable of satisfying various research needs. finally, we present a working example case study, illustrating how the dataset can be utilized to quantify congress' inclination on energy policies. ## related work nlp in congressional analysis many studies have demonstrated the potential of nlp to improve our understanding of the legislative system. congress has been the subject of many quantitative text analyses to extract political, financial, and socioeconomic insights. politically, researchers have examined partisanship, ideology, and member connections. for instance, @xcite leveraged a data science approach to analyze 138 years of congressional speeches, revealing trends in political speech complexity, sentiment, and partisan differences. their analysis demonstrated two key trends: first, congressional hearings became more readable over time but have experienced a sharp decline in readability since the 1970s. second, there has been an increase in polarized statements, with more instances of both highly positive and highly negative language. these trends suggest that the nature of congressional communication has shifted, potentially reflecting more complex or specialized legislative language, alongside increasingly divided political rhetoric, which may mirror the growing polarization in society and within the legislative body itself. @xcite demonstrated that a speaker's political party could be predicted based on word choice, indicating that partisanship can be inferred from simple semantic properties. more specifically, @xcite highlighted the role of cultural references in congressional speeches in distinguishing the political ideologies of congress members. beyond the us congress, @xcite utilized nlp and machine learning to analyze speeches in the brazilian national congress, employing network analysis to assess relationships between members, which in turn helps understand party cohesion. their findings suggest that similar methods could be applied to uncover hidden power dynamics or biases in other legislative bodies. ## conclusion we introduce cocohd, a comprehensive u.s. congressional hearings dataset with over 32,000 transcripts and metadata from 1997 to 2024. our case study on the energy and commerce committee demonstrates cocohd's utility by analyzing congressional attitudes toward fossil fuels and clean energy. we developed an inclination measure per hearing, quantifying stances on fossil fuels versus clean energy, validated through google search trends and a statistically significant correlation with energy market indicators. cocohd offers extensive opportunities for researchers to explore congressional perspectives on various critical social issues. by analyzing these topics, researchers can gain insights into legislative priorities, ideological leanings, and evolving policy discussions within congress.