Discourse Analysis of Legislative Bill Discussions

arXiv:2611.05381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legislative hearings are distinct communication events with their own human recognizable structure and logic, yet they have been analyzed as distinct phenomena beyond their transcripts. Understanding legislative hearings at a deeper level is a major step in analyzing the work and power relationships within democratic bodies. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end pipeline for parsing rhetorical structures from legislative committee hearings with the goal of improving legislative discourse analysis and democratic accountability. We also propose a rhetorical structure grammar and find that 55.21% of California state bill discussions in our dataset can be parsed with this grammar. We evaluate our pipeline with two utterance section classifiers on a random subset of over 2,000 annotated utterances corresponding to 100 hearings. We find that a logistic regression-based classifier with grammar-based output masking and utterance tag smoothing outperforms more complex models, achieving an F1 score of 52.8% against our ground truth discourse section labels.