  We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S.
Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or
opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the
fact that these speeches occur as part of a discussion; this allows us to use
sources of information regarding relationships between discourse segments, such
as whether a given utterance indicates agreement with the opinion expressed by
another. We find that the incorporation of such information yields substantial
improvements over classifying speeches in isolation.
