Prior work on this task has relied on the use of MPs' division votes as sentiment polarity labels, under the assumption that these votes represent the speakers' opinions to-wards the subjects under discussion: votes for 'Aye' (that the motion be approved) or 'No' (that it be negated) are presumed to indicate positive and negative sentiment, respectively.
as MP voting is to a large extent constrained by party affiliations, with members often under pressure to follow the party whip regardless of their personal opinion (Searing, 1994;Norton, 1997), we perform sentiment analysis experiments on the Hansard Debates with Sentiment Tags (HanDeSeT) corpus, which features manually annotated sentiment labels in addition to those extracted from division votes .