POLITICAL RHETORIC IN ELECTIONS
Daniela Gifu
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Abstract
This study describes a tool for identifying the prevailing rhetorical tones in electoral speeches (here the 2014 presidential campaign in Romania), especially from the print press. The application, abbreviated PDA, allows for a rapid and robust interpretation of the electoral language, requiring an interdisciplinary approach. By emphasizing the rhetoric component at the level of speech, electors identify with the candidate, who becomes the personification of their common expectations. Rhetoric diversity is an important problem for receiving message, due to the heterogeneity of auditors. This investigation is intended to give support to specialists in political sciences, to political analysts, sociologists and election's staff, being helpful mainly in their interpretation of the electoral campaigns, as well as to the media, in their intend to evaluate reactions with respect to the developments in the political scene.
Key takeaways
- Among many attributes the political discourse has in print media (i.e. the editorials), we were interested in the lexicon and its interpretation in a range of semantic coordinates.
- The PDA lexicon now contains over 10.000 lemmas and 33 semantic classes presented in Table 1.
- The user can notice directly the mentioned semantic classes (and the corresponding frequencies), as the words belonging to a selected class appear underlined with a colour in the left screen.
- To exemplify, we present below a graph with two streams of data, representing the political discourses between the two remaining presidential candidates in the election race, the second tour of voting.
- In the future our intention is to include a word sense disambiguation module in order to determine the correct senses, in context, of those words which are ambiguous between different semantic classes belonging to the lexicon, or between classes in the lexicon and outside the lexicon (in which case they would not have to be counted).
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