Multimodal speaker identification in legislative discourse
Daniel Kauffman, Michael Williams, Calin Washington, Gudrun Socher, Foaad Khosmood · 2018
A first-of-its-kind platform, Digital Democracy1 offers a searchable archive of all statements made in US state legislative hearings in four American states (California, New York, Texas and Florida) covering one third of the US population. The purpose of the platform is to increase government transparency in state legislatures. It allows citizens to follow state lawmakers, lobbyists, and advocates as they debate, craft, and vote on policy proposals. State hearings in the U.S. are typically recorded on video and broadcast on cable TV stations, but they are not transcribed or indexed. No official written records of these exist anywhere. Digital Democracy creates professional quality transcripts and provides them publicly in a searchable and video-synchronized format.