  How can we utilize state-of-the-art NLP tools to better understand
legislative deliberation? Committee hearings are a core feature of any
legislature, and they offer an institutional setting which promotes the
exchange of arguments and reasoning that directly impact and shape legislation.
We apply What Is Being Argued (WIBA), which is an argument extraction and
analysis framework that we previously developed, to U.S. Congressional
committee hearings from 2005 to 2023 (109th to 117th Congresses). Then, we
further expand WIBA by introducing new ways to quantify various dynamics of
democratic deliberation. Specifically, these extensions present a variety of
summary statistics capturing how deliberative or controversial a discourse was,
as well as useful visualizations to the WIBA output that aid analyzing
arguments made during the legislative deliberation. Our application reveals
potential biases in the committee system, and how political parties control the
flow of information in 'hot topic' hearings.
