Overall sentiment
In sentiment analysis, each word is scored for its emotional base value. Some words have a positive core, others negative. Not all words are recognized as conveying emotion: only a little under 10% of all words receive a score, at least that’s the case with these speeches.
Global Scores per Speech
The first plot gives a comparison of positive and negative scores for each inaugural.
Most Frequent Sentiment Terms
Top Positive Terms
The following plot shows the most frequent positive-scored terms for each speech together with its number of occurrences.1
Figure 1: Sentiment analysis: top-ranked positive terms.
Top Negative Terms
Below follows the same visualization as above, but for the terms with negative semantic loads.
Figure 2: Sentiment analysis: top-ranked negative terms.
Positive-to-Negative Ratio
The following plot shows the pos:neg ratio for the speeches.
Interpretation
Once again, 2005-Bush stands out: it has by far the highest frequency of emotionally loaded terms out of all four speeches. When we look closer, we see that much of this is attributable to the hyper-frequent use of freedom and free.
All four speeches are reticent when it comes to negative terms. This must be due to that good old American optimism that we’re seeing.
Shown are the top-6 ranked terms for each speech. Sometimes there are ties for ranks.↩︎