CoCoHD: Congress Committee Hearing Dataset

TL;DR

The CoCoHD dataset provides a comprehensive collection of U.S. congressional hearings from 1997 to 2024, enabling analysis of policy language and trends on critical issues like energy, healthcare, and social justice.

Contribution

This paper introduces the first large-scale, multi-decade dataset of congressional hearings, along with methods to analyze policy discourse and predict sector trends using language models.

Findings

The dataset covers 32,697 records across 86 committees.

Fine-tuned language models can measure sector-specific policy stances.

Analysis predicts and highlights trends in the energy sector.

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 Congress Committee Hearing Dataset (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.