Most frequent words

Summary statistics

      This is intended as an objective analysis. I am not trying to make either candidate look good, or bad. I have used these same text analysis techniques in other projects such as analyzing Hamlet, analying short stories, and analyzing the Twitter tweets of a radio talk show host.

      For each of Trump and Harris, I started with a transcript of their convention sppeches. I believe the transcripts are their spoken transcripts, not their written transcripts, based on their very first few sentences. I used various computer packages in R such as tm and tidytext to tokenize the documents into individual sentences, words, and characters. I was guided by the works of Silge and Robinson in Text Mining with R and Williams in Data Science Desktop Survival Guide.

      A summary and a comparison of the of the tokenization of the speeches is the following, repeated from before.

      Sentiment analysis ia analyzing text to determine its emotional tone. Linguistics experts have built dictionaries that associate a large list of words with eight emotions (anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust) and also negative and positive sentiments. For example, the word “ache” is associated with sadness. Some words have more than one emotion; for example “admirable” is associated with both joy and trust. Further, some words have either negative or positive associations.

      There are some limitations in sentiment analysis. The sentiment dictionary does not recognize sarcasm, and I am limiting my analysis to single words so I am not picking up negation (such as “not expensive”) or other instances where the emotion requires several words. A conclusion from the sentiment distribution graph is that the candidates are surprisingly similar in most of these emotions. The biggest differences are that Trump has a greater portion of his words categorized as anger and negative than Harris has.

Most frequent positive and megative words

      Trump has a larger percentage of negative words (negative divided by positive plus negative) than Harris (43% to 37%). These positive and negative lists seem consistent with my memory of their speeches.

Most frequent words

Distribution of word sizes

Final thoughts

      It is hard to be indifferent about the 2024 US presidential election. You have your opinion, and I have mine. Much of what the candidates say is their opinion, or their plan if elected, and these things are not things we can verify.

      Some things the candidates say as if they are facts, are stated in a way that is open to interpretation. A good example is that “You are better (or worse) off financially today than four years ago.” I can choose one measure, collect some data, and show I am better off; or I can choose a very different measure, collect some data, and show I am worse off.

      Some things the candidates say as facts ARE verifiable. I am in no position to do such verifying, but a number of third parties do this. Here are a few links. I can not vouch for their reliability or bias.

• AP News
• FACT Check
• Reuters
• Snopes
• Verify This

      The following is my R code:

# Trump convention speech, July 19, 2024
# https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us/politics/trump-rnc-speech-transcript.html

# Harris convention speech, August 23, 2024
# https://singjupost.com/full-transcript-kamala-harriss-2024-dnc-speech/?singlepage=1

library(tidytext)
library(tm)
library(dplyr)
library(nsyllable)
library(SnowballC)
library(ggplot2)
library(forcats)
library(ggpubr)

speaker <- readline(prompt = "Enter Trump, or enter Harris: ")
if (speaker == “Trump” | speaker == “Harris”) print(speaker) else print(“Invalid input”)
trump_file <- "C:/Users/Jerry/Desktop/Harris_Trump/trump_convention_speech.txt"
harris_file <- "C:/Users/Jerry/Desktop/Harris_Trump/harris_convention_speech.txt"
textfile <- ifelse(speaker=="Trump", trump_file, harris_file)
textfile <- readLines(textfile)
text_df <- data.frame(line = 1:length(textfile), text=textfile)
names(text_df)[2] <- "text"

docs <- Corpus(VectorSource(text_df$text))
docs <- tm_map(docs, content_transformer(tolower))
docs <- tm_map(docs, removeNumbers)
docs <- tm_map(docs, removePunctuation, ucp=TRUE)
docs <- tm_map(docs, stripWhitespace)
inspect(docs[1:8])

custom_colors <- c("#1f77b4", "#ff7f0e", "#2ca02c", "#d62728", "#9467bd",
      “#8c564b”, “#e377c2”, “#7f7f7f”, “#bcbd22”, “#17becf”,
      “#6a3d9a”, “#ff9e1b”, “#f6c6c7”, “#8dd3c7”, “#ffffb3”,
      “#bebada”, “#fb8072”, “#80b1d3”, “#fdb462”, “#b3e2cd”,
      “#ccebc5”)

common_theme <- theme(
      legend.position=”NULL”,
      plot.title = element_text(size=15, face=”bold”),
      plot.subtitle = element_text(size=12.5, face=”bold”),
      axis.title = element_text(size=15, face=”bold”),
      axis.text = element_text(size=15, face=”bold”),
      legend.title = element_text(size=15, face=”bold”),
      legend.text = element_text(size=15, face=”bold”))

docs_df <- data.frame(text = sapply(docs, as.character)) # Convert Corpus to data.frame
wordfile <- unnest_tokens(docs_df, word, text, token = "words")
wordfile %>% count(word, sort=TRUE)
wordcountfile <- mutate(wordfile, numbchars = nchar(word)) # characters per word
long1 <- wordcountfile[which(wordcountfile$numbchars == max(wordcountfile$numbchars)),1] # longest word long2 <- wordcountfile[which(wordcountfile$numbchars == max(wordcountfile$numbchars)),2]
numberchars <- sum(wordcountfile$numbchars)
numberwords <- sum(count(wordcountfile, word, sort=TRUE)$n) # no. words
avgcharperword <- round(numberchars / numberwords, digits=2)
sentencefile <- unnest_tokens(text_df, sentence, text, token = "sentences")
sentencecount <- sum(count(sentencefile, sentence, sort=TRUE)$n)
avgwordpersent <- round(numberwords/sentencecount,2)

wordcountdist <- wordcountfile %>% count(numbchars)
wordcountdist$numbchars <- as.factor(wordcountdist$numbchars)
title <- paste(speaker, "- Distribution of Word Size")
subtitle <- paste("Longest word: ", long1, long2, "characters")
ggplot(wordcountdist, aes(numbchars, n, fill=numbchars)) +
      geom_bar(stat=”identity”, position = “dodge”, width=0.5) +
      labs(title=title, subtitle=subtitle) +
      xlab(“number of characters per word”) + ylab(“”) +
      scale_fill_manual(values = custom_colors) +
      theme(legend.position = “none”) +
      common_theme

syls <- nsyllable(wordfile$word, language = "en")
syls[which(wordfile$word == “jd”)] <- 2 # used because nsyllable generated error here
syls[which(wordfile$word == “nd”)] <- 1 # used because nsyllable generated error here
syls[which(wordfile$word == “st”)] <- 3 # s/b 21st; used because nsyllable generated error here
syls[which(wordfile$word == “gasolinepowered”)] <- 5 # used because nsyllable erred here
long2 <- min(syls[(syls == max(syls, na.rm=TRUE))], na.rm=TRUE)
w <- min(which(syls == long2))
long1 <- wordfile$word[w]
avgsylperword <- round(sum(syls)/numberwords, digits = 2)
avgsylperword
syls <- data.frame(syls) %>% count(syls)
syls$syls <- as.factor(syls$syls)
colnames(syls) <- c("syllables", "n")
title <- paste(speaker, "- Distribution of No. Syllables per Word")
subtitle <- paste("Most syllables: ", long1, long2, "syllables")
ggplot(syls, aes(syllables, n, fill = syllables)) +
      geom_bar(stat=”identity”, position = “dodge”, width=0.5) +
      labs(title=title, subtitle=subtitle) +
      xlab(“number of syllables per word”) + ylab(“”) +
      scale_fill_manual(values = custom_colors) +
      theme(legend.position = “none”) +
      common_theme

# Flesch-Kincaid reading ease formula
flesch <- round(206.835 - 1.015*(numberwords/sentencecount) - 84.6*(sum(syls$n)/numberwords),2) # Flesch reading ease
flesch
flesch_df <- data.frame(score = c(0,30,50,60,70,80,90,100),
      grade = c(“College graduate”,”College”,”10th – 12th grade”,”8th – 9th grade”,
      “7th grade”,”6th grade”,”5th grade”,”below 5th grade”))

# Function to find the grade based on score; vlookup
find_grade <- function(score, flesch_df) {
  idx <- findInterval(score, flesch_df$score)
  if (idx == 0) {
   return(“below 5th grade”) # Handle case where score is below the minimum
  } else {
   return(flesch_df$grade[idx])
  }
}

score_to_find <- flesch
flesch_grade <- find_grade(score_to_find, flesch_df)
flesch_grade

# delete stop words
docs_df <- data.frame(text = sapply(docs, as.character)) # Convert Corpus to data.frame
wordfile <- unnest_tokens(docs_df, word, text, token = "words")
stop_words <- data.frame(tidytext::stop_words) # more words than tm
my_stop_words <- data.frame(word = c("theyre", "hes", "dont",
   “didnt”,”youre”,”cant”, “im”,”whats”, “weve”, “theyve”, “youve”,
   “couldnt”, “wont”, “youd”))
wordfile <- anti_join(wordfile, stop_words)
wordfile <- anti_join(wordfile, my_stop_words)

wordfreq <- wordfile
wordfreq <- count(wordfreq, word, sort=TRUE) # word frequency excl stop words
wordfreqdf <- data.frame(wordfreq)

unique_words <- nrow(wordfreq)
portion_unique_words <- round(unique_words / numberwords, digits=2)
wordfreqdf20 <- wordfreqdf[1:21,] # Think about threshold
wordfreqdf20

graphtitle <- paste(speaker, "Word Frequency")
wordfreqdf20$word <- fct_reorder(wordfreqdf20$word, wordfreqdf20$n, .desc = FALSE)
ggplot(data=wordfreqdf20, aes(x=word, y=n, fill=word)) +
      geom_bar(stat=”identity”, position = “dodge”, width=0.5) +
      coord_flip() +
      common_theme +
      xlab(“”) + ylab(“Frequency”) +
      ggtitle(graphtitle) +
      scale_fill_manual(values = custom_colors) +
      theme(legend.position = “none”)

# sentiments; note mother is both positive and negative!
df1 <- data.frame(wordfile)
colnames(df1) <- "word"
df2 <- get_sentiments("nrc")
df3 <- merge(x=df1, y=df2, by="word", all.x=TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
df3 <- subset(df3, !is.na(sentiment))
table(df3$sentiment)
w <- data.frame(table(df3$sentiment))
colnames(w) <- c("sentiment", "n")

sentiment_colors <- c(
   “Anger” = “red”,
   “Anticipation” = “green”,
   “Disgust” = “brown”,
   “Fear” = “purple”,
   “Joy” = “yellow”,
   “Negative” = “gray”,
   “Positive” = “lightblue”,
   “Sadness” = “blue”,
   “Surprise” = “pink”,
   “Trust” = “turquoise”)

title <- paste(speaker, "- Sentiment Plot")
ggplot(w, aes(sentiment, n)) +
      geom_bar(stat = “identity”, position = “dodge”, width = 0.5, fill = sentiment_colors) +
      ggtitle(title) +
      ylab(“”) +
      common_theme +
      theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust=1))

df4 <- df3 %>% filter(sentiment == “positive” | sentiment == “negative”)
w <- with(df4, table(sentiment))
neg <- w[1]
pos <- w[2]
neg_ratio <- round(w[1] / (w[1] + w[2]), digits=2)
df5 <- df4 %>% group_by(sentiment) %>% count(word, sort=TRUE)
pos_freq <- df5 %>% filter(sentiment==”positive”) %>% top_n(10, wt = n) %>% slice_head(n = 10)
neg_freq <- df5 %>% filter(sentiment==”negative”) %>% top_n(10, wt = n) %>% slice_head(n = 10) # ties
pos_freq$word <- fct_reorder(pos_freq$word, pos_freq$n, .desc = FALSE)
neg_freq$word <- fct_reorder(neg_freq$word, neg_freq$n, .desc = FALSE)

title <- paste(speaker, "- Most Frequent Positive and Negative Words")
p1 <- ggplot(pos_freq, aes(word, n)) +
      geom_bar(stat=”identity”, position = “dodge”, width=0.5, fill=”darkgreen”) +
      ggtitle(“Positves”) +
      common_theme +
      xlab(“”) +
      coord_flip()
p2 <- ggplot(neg_freq, aes(word, n)) +
      geom_bar(stat=”identity”, position = “dodge”, width=0.5, fill=”red”) +
      ggtitle(“Negatives”) +
      common_theme +
      xlab(“”) +
      coord_flip()
plot <- ggarrange(p1,p2, ncol=2, nrow=1, legend=NULL)
annotate_figure(plot, top = text_grob(title,
    color = “black”, face = “bold”, size = 14))

if (speaker == “Trump”){
   t <- data_frame(speaker, numberwords, avgwordpersent, avgcharperword, avgsylperword, flesch, flesch_grade, portion_unique_words, neg_ratio)
   print(t)
   } else {h <- data_frame(speaker, numberwords, avgwordpersent, avgcharperword, avgsylperword, flesch, flesch_grade, portion_unique_words, neg_ratio)
    conclusion <- data.frame(rbind(t,h))
    conclusion <- t(conclusion)
    colnames(conclusion) <- c("Trump", "Harris")
    conclusion <- conclusion[-1,]
    print(conclusion)
}

# the results of stemming and lemmatizing were not used in the report
# stemming
wordfile <- wordfile %>%
    mutate(stem = wordStem(word)) %>%
    count(stem, sort = TRUE)

# lemmatize
df1 <- wordfile # df1 has col named stem
url <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/michmech/lemmatization-lists/master/lemmatization-en.txt"
df2 <- read.table(url, header = FALSE, sep = "\t", quote = "", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
names(df2) <- c("stem", "word")
df3 <- merge(x = df1, y = df2, by = "stem", all.x = TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

# if word is not in dictionary, then leave word as is; otherwise, use stemmed word.
df3$word <- ifelse(is.na(df3$word), df3$stem, df3$stem)

# End