Feature Engineering for US State Legislative Hearings: Stance, Affiliation, Engagement and Absentees

Authorship
Joshua Grace and Foaad Khosmood
Publication
Digital Humanities 2023
Conference
Location
Graz, Austria
Abstract

In US State government legislatures, most activity occurs in committees made of lawmakers discussing bills. This paper presents systems to extract legislators' engagement and absence during committee meetings and the stance and affiliation of non-lawmakers making public comments. We propose a system to track the affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational representative supports or opposes the bill.