Sentences From the House of Commons Annotated for Temporal Focus, 1979-2023

This collection includes almost four thousand sentences taken from the Commons Hansard between 1979 and 2023, and independently coded for their temporal focus by two researchers.

The sentences were drawn randomly from XML versions of the Hansard Corpus as maintained by https://www.publicwhip.org.uk/, and after removing procedural language found in italics, or language with no associated speaker. The data therefore approximate a simple random sample of the population of sentences spoken in the Commons during this period.

Sentences are classified as being about the past, the future, or the present. The data contains the codings given independently by each researcher, together with the consensus coding established by the two researchers working jointly.

The purpose of this human coding was to fine-tune a large language model in order to classify other sentences from the UK House of Commons and other English language legislative bodies; to use these classifications to determine how much politicians speak about the future; and to determine how, if at all, the proportion of speech which is about the future changes in different individual and political contexts.

The coding is specific to parliamentary language, and transferability to other contexts may be limited.