overstated / october 2004

You forgot “Smoooooooooooke’n” … woops, wrong Kerry.

You may want to rework your numbers. I searched the transcripts and counted occurrences of some of those phrases. The numbers you give are higher than the number of occurrences in the transcript (for example, Kerry’s mention of Tora Bora occurred only twice).

A very cool idea, though.

The numbers he gives are not the nmber of times the phrase occurred. “The number following each phrase is a rank described by the length of the phrase and the number of times it appeared.”

Amy’s Robot did a similar, though less technically sophisticated, analysis that gives the number of occurrences of each phrase. Here’s the post.

Although not only used as a noun phrase, I think it is equally revealling to find that Bush used the word VOTE 7 times, while Kerry only did 3 times.

text analysis is pretty cool. With software like textpac and catpac (and a gazillion others) you can count the occurence of individual words, plus the occurence of words in relation to certain other words. Knowing that Bush said “hard work” 13 times is interesting, but knowing that he said it 13 times next to words describing his own job - as a potential rhetorical strategy to get us to feel bad for the poor little guy, he must be tuckered out! nation-building is rough stuff! - is pretty interesting too.

I realize this isn’t your department, but the Oct. 3, 2000 Gore-Bush Debate on that CPD transcripts page is actually linked to the transcript of the Kerry-Bush debate on Sept. 30, 2004. So far, I haven’t found the webmaster’s contact info.

This is really interesting. Language Log did a related analysis on both candidates’ sentence length, with Kerry’s (as expected) average sentence length higher, as well as his contribution in words to the debate overall (though Bush had slightly more sentences…but they were shorter).

I wondered about the amount of “Hard Work” comments were made during Bush’s parts of the debate. Thanks for posting it.

Sue

Quotient — Frequency is one of the two parameters I’m using. I would consider the frequency relative to the documents if the definition of document made more sense. I could look at the words in terms of their use within turns of the dialog, e.g. is the word common in one turn of Bush or the entire talk. Unlike TFIDF though I’d be looking for phrases with low IDF, or rather to maximize the DF instead of the IDF, i.e., the more spread out a phrase is, the more important the phrase is for the talk.

The reason I’m including the phrase length in the calculation of the rank is that it’s more interesting to see a long phrase repeated instead rather than a short one. For instance, Bush says “free Iraq” 12 times and “Iraq” 52 times. Both are noun phrases, but the term “free Iraq” has more semantic meaning and importance than the single word Iraq. In describing the phrases, I think longer phrases are more meaningful, and thus more interesting, but I want to balance this feature with the frequency. Does that make sense?

Isn’t it important for any candidate to state their standpoint and DEBATE, rather than to reiterate their campaign, to say what they have been saying over and over and over. By using noun phrases they are just creating “coined terms” that induce an individual to take a side on the basis of how they sound, on what the semantic meaning of these terms are, rather on the “core belief” (another highly used term, by the way)of each candidate.

Are there programs out there like this one we can use for other speeches? Or can you provide yours via the Web to political junkies?

Hours of fun, but on a serious note, such analyses of elections will find their way into serious considerations of the styles and strategies of candidates for office.

Odd that Kerry’s top 25 list includes “Osama bin” rather than “Osama bin Laden” — the former phrase was never spoken in the debate without “Laden” after it.

How about we count emotional expressions as buzzwords? After being provoked, a certain candidate gave emotional expression, before taking a moment of recomposure and delivering a substantive answer. The debate in the media was not about capturing where each person stood, and allowing the voters to see which camp backs the way they feel. Rather than focus on the substance, the aftermath focused on a sort of buzzword: emotional facial expressions …

I don’t understand why you think this is a “random kind of analysis,” given that it’s using techniques employed by computational linguists for decades. The motivation is simple: computers allow us to see patterns that we wouldn’t see otherwise.

There are really two parts to this post, the first being the linguistic analysis above, and the second being the Debate Spotter tool for visualizing the results. The former provides utility because it aggregates phrases at a level that connects with the semantics of the speaker, namely if there’s a phrase or jargon that they’re trying to repeat, it will typically be in the form of a noun phrase. The latter tool allows people to do their own investigative work without spending hours poring over the text. I’d like to know who was talking about a particular topic more, but I don’t really want to count for every word.

Is that not motivation enough to invest an hour of coding time? And personally I don’t think it’s interesting in the Perl sense at all, as “perl -MCPAN -e install Lingua::EN::Tagger” is pretty trivial.

I think your counts would be more interesting if you collected together phrases that had essentially identical meanings, like the “wrong war etc.” of which you have two interchangeable versions, or by including “working hard” (twice) with “hard work” (eleven).

Interesting, Kerry mentions “Florida” twice, while Bush doesn’t mention the state by name at all, ever. Pretty remarkable, considering the debate was held in Coral Gables, FL. It’s as if Bush is afraid to jinx the upcoming election by drawing people’s attention to the state, i.e. his trojan horse. Or was Florida a gift horse in 2000? Or simply a stolen horse? At any rate, great tool, Cameron.

Did anyone keep score of how many questions each candidate actually answered directly, I mean actually answered the question that was asked? My favorite was the right to life issue which Kerry completely skirted by saying that he didn’t want to bring his personal views into it, WELL HELL SON, That’s how we vote for presidents, on their personal views (at least that’s how we hang ‘em). Well I’ll tell you, as far as directly answering the questions Bush wins hands down, so much so that we might even overlook this oil baron’s bullshit answer to about spending a billion dollars on hydrogen cell research. As you can tell I have no love for either candidate, but as far as this debate goes, Bush’s advisors kicked the hell out of Kerry’s advisors hands down. Advisors took a huge part in this debate evidenced by how intelligent bush sounded, as well as his complete lack of the use of clichés and the usual catch phrases. P.S. I would love to see proof of the billion dollars spent on hydrogen cell research if anyone has it handy.

Click on “Wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time” under Bush and read that through.

Another phrase of interest would be “no child left behind”

tax cut - Kerry 17, Bush 4

so where can i sign up to vote for arnold?

Yes, yes, of course he is. XP

I’m in Dubai, UAE. I have special interest in working with texts.
Could you tutor me on this subject. I need to learn how to do the analysis of texts and what tools to use.

I really hate the fact that both canidates say the same thing over and over. I was going towards Kerry but all he’s focused on is Iraq. The main thing. Bush spent 42% of his time on vacation during the 6 months that he was in office before 9/11. Was he ready? No way. They are both idiots. But Kerry might be able to save the economy.
Leslie

Everyone should vote for john kerry he makes so much more sense then bush. Bush just blabs away about anything that comes to mind. he has the IQ of a rock

fuck

People should get a little more educated about voting, instead going out there and just do it they need to know the real issues and I think that people who is lazy and likes free stuff should vote for Kerry, because that’s all he is about.

hi.
Do you have any programs or ideas that you might want to try out with music? I’ve allways wanted to mix the two.
/ Sebastian, Sweden.