6 Sentiment

A sentiment analysis of the speeches.

Lars Hinrichs http://larshinrichs.site (The University of Texas at Austin)
01-20-2021
Words are like eggs: some are happy, some are sad.  (Image from Tengyart/unsplash.com.)

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

Sentiment analysis: top-ranked positive terms.

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.

Sentiment analysis: top-ranked negative terms.

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.


  1. Shown are the top-6 ranked terms for each speech. Sometimes there are ties for ranks.↩︎

References

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Hinrichs (2021, Jan. 20). Texan Inaugural Addresses: 6 Sentiment. Retrieved from https://texan-inaugurals.netlify.app/posts/6-sentiment/

BibTeX citation

@misc{hinrichs20216,
  author = {Hinrichs, Lars},
  title = {Texan Inaugural Addresses: 6 Sentiment},
  url = {https://texan-inaugurals.netlify.app/posts/6-sentiment/},
  year = {2021}
}