Influence and Belief in Congressional Hearings

We report on an exploratory analysis of the 2014 PoliInformatics congressional hearing corpus using CUBISM, a system for the analysis and deep understanding of multi-participant dialogues. CUBISM brings together two typically separate forms of discourse analysis: semantic analysis and sociolinguistic analysis. In the paper proper, we describe CUBISM and illustrate some of the major analytical components. Then, we explain how we use sociolinguistic phenomena to guide the extraction of potentially interesting beliefs. Finally, we discuss how the PoliInformatics corpus poses certain analytical challenges because of the motivations and preparations of congressional hearing participants.