task_categories:text-classification language:en license:afl-3.0 region:us
---
license: afl-3.0
task_categories:
- text-classification
language:
- en
pretty_name: U.S. Congressional Bills, 113–117
---

# Data Card for Congressional Bills Corpus

The raw data come from [GovInfo](govinfo.gov) bulk downloads. Files were preprocessed minimally to create pickled dataframes of the bill text.
Data from GovInfo on the bills' committees, sponsors, and cosponsors are also available.

## Topic labels
Bill text is joined to two sets of topic labels. 
The Congresssional Research Service tags bills with non-exclusive topic labels. 
Because these tags are numerous and specific, the top 250 most common tags were aggregated into roughly two dozen broader policy areas, which are the labels a that appear in this dataset.
The Congressional Bills Project labeled landmark legislation from 1973 to 2017 with a single major topic label and a single minor topic label.
