# C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21548/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [MediaSum: A Large-scale Media Interview Dataset for Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06410/) (2021)
- [Dialogue Act Classification with Context-Aware Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02594/) (2019)
- [Did they answer? Subjective acts and intents in conversational discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04470/) (2021)
- ["I Never Said That": A dataset, taxonomy and baselines on response clarity classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13879/) (2024)
- [Asking Too Much? The Rhetorical Role of Questions in Political Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02254/) (2017)
- [PolInterviews -- A Dataset of German Politician Public Broadcast Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04484/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SemEval-2026 Task 6: CLARITY -- Unmasking Political Question Evasions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14027/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th--117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.