Word Analysis of 2012 U.S. Presidential Debates

Obama vs. Romney / Biden vs. Ryan

Introduction

This analysis explores word usage and lexical content of the 2012 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. It is based on the same approach I used to analyze the 2008 debates.

The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, pronouns and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify priorities, perspectives, characteristic values and personality traits.

I analyze the debate for the following

• • word frequency and distribution for different parts of speech
• • words exclusive to a candidate, and those shared by both candidates
• • complexity of noun phrases, which relate to independent concepts
• • a general measure of complexity and repetition in speech, nicknamed the Windbag Index.

A formal debate serves as a great text for this kind of analysis. The format is somewhat controlled: each speaker is subjected to the same stimulus (question) and is given the same amount of time to respond. Reduced is the variation that would appear in analysis of interviews and other unscripted speech.

Methods

The transcript for each debate is parsed to identify the speaker, tag stop words with their part of speech (tagging), and identify noun phrases (chunking).

The tagged and chunked transcripts are analyzed to determine

• • word frequency distribution for each candidate
• • sentence size and proportion of unique words
• • words exclusive to a candidate and those shared by both candidates
• • frequency of concepts, as defined by part of speech pairings (e.g. noun/verb)
• • complexity of noun phrases
• • word clouds for a variety of word lists extracted from the transcripts (e.g. all nouns unique to Obama)

I attempt to quantify the overall complexity of speech by a metric I call the Windbag Index, which is a product of 8 terms each measuring uniqueness in different aspects of speech (more about Windbag Index).

A full description of each of the steps in the analysis is available in the detailed methods section.

The analysis has some limitations.

Results and Commentary

Detailed results and comments are available for each debate.

Analysis of Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (1st debate)

Analysis of Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (2nd debate)

Analysis of Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (3nd debate)

Analysis of Joe Biden vs Paul Ryan

Analysis of Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (combined debates)

Analysis of Barack Obama (2008 vs 2012)

Each debate analysis report contains a great deal of data. Every debate report is shown in exactly the same format, which should help you with making comparisons. To start, you may find these elements the most interesting

• • part of speech analysis
• • accounting and word clouds of words used exclusively by a candidate

tables & basic word clouds

▲ Word usage tables describe the structural characteristics of speech by frequency of words, sentence size, proportion of unique and exclusive words and breakdown of words by part-of-speech • see example

▲ Word clouds for each candidate, categorized by parts of speech. Obama promises "folks" "opportunity" • see example

▲ Word clouds, categorized by ownership. Romney loves using "middle-income" • see example

▲ Word clouds for concepts based on part-of-speech pairs. Obama focuses on "middle-class families" and "small business", to Romney's "federal tax". • see example

Word Usage Summary

Below are two summary tables from the full analysis of the first debate.

Table 1

sentence size

Number of sentences spoken by each speaker and sentence word count statistics. Number of words in a sentence is shown by average and 50%/90% cumulative values for all, stop and non-stop words.

speaker	number of sentences	sentence size
		all	stop	non-stop
Barack Obama	391	18.6 download text • 26 50	10.6 download text • 15 29	8.4 download text • 12 23
Mitt Romney	579	13.5 download text • 18 37	7.8 download text • 10 22	6.0 download text • 8 18
total	970	17.5 23 46	10.9 13 28	9.0 11 22

Fields with • (e.g. 155•) link to data files. Hover over the field to show these links. See analysis.

Table 2

part of speech count

Count of words categorized by part of speech (POS).

	part of speech
	n+v+adj+adv	nouns (n)	verbs (v)	adjectives (adj)	adverbs (adv)
Barack Obama	2,949 download text • 1,061 40.5% 36.0%	1,447 download text • 543 49.1% 37.5%	837 download text • 356 28.4% 42.5%	511 download text • 252 17.3% 49.3%	154 download text • 62 5.2% 40.3%
Mitt Romney	3,112 download text • 1,025 39.9% 32.9%	1,580 download text • 550 50.8% 34.8%	813 download text • 330 26.1% 40.6%	572 download text • 273 18.4% 47.7%	147 download text • 55 4.7% 37.4%
total	6,061 download text • 1,600 40.2% 26.4%	3,027 download text • 845 49.9% 27.9%	1,650 download text • 555 27.2% 33.6%	1,083 download text • 412 17.9% 38.0%	301 download text • 86 5.0% 28.6%

Fields with • (e.g. 155•) link to data files. Hover over the field to show these links. See analysis.

Windbag Index

Word Clouds

Word clouds below are colored by part of speech:   noun   verb   adjective   adverb  

▲ Words exclusive to Barack Obama (not spoken by Romney) in the first debate, colored by part of speech. Note the repeated use of "folks" and "opportunity".	▲ Words exclusive to Mitt Romney (not spoken by Obama) in the first debate, colored by part of speech: "always", "lose" and "hurt". Ouch.
▲ All nouns in debates, colored by contributing speaker (green = Obama, blue = Romney, grey = spoken by both).	▲ All verbs in debates, colored by contributing speaker (green = Obama, blue = Romney, grey = spoken by both).

Downloads

Content of word list archive and data structure syntax is described in the methods section.

Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (1st debate) transcript word lists tag clouds data structure

Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (2nd debate) transcript word lists tag clouds data structure

Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (3nd debate) transcript word lists tag clouds data structure

Joe Biden vs Paul Ryan transcript word lists tag clouds data structure

Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney (combined debates) transcript word lists tag clouds data structure

Barack Obama (2008 vs 2012) transcript word lists tag clouds data structure