To understand the topics that actually are important to different political parties is a difficult task. Can text analytics together with an search index be an approach to given a better understanding?
This blog post describes how IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics (WCA) can be used to make sense of Swedish politics. All speeches (in Swedish: anföranden) in the Swedish Parliament from 2004 to 2015 are analyzed using WCA. In total 139 110 transcribed text documents were analyzed. The Swedish language support build by Findwise for WCA is used together with a few text analytic processing steps which parses out person names, political party, dates and topics of interest. The selected topics in this analyzed are all related to infrastructure and different types of fuels.
We start by looking at how some of the topics are mentioned over time.
The view shows topic which has a higher number of mentions compared to what would be expected during one year. Here we can see among other topics that the topic flygplats (airport) has a high increase in number of mentioning during 2014.
So let’s dive down and see what is being said about the topic flygplats during 2014.
The above image shows how the different political parties are mentioning the topic flygplats during the year 2014. The blue bar shows the number of times the topic flygplats was mentioned by each political party during the year. The green bar shows the WCA correlation value which indicates how strongly related a term is to the current filter. What we can conclude is that party Moderaterna mentioned flygplats during 2014 more frequently than other parties.
Reviewing the most correlated nouns when filtering on flygplats and the year 2014 shows among some other nouns: Bromma (place in Sweden), airport and nedläggning (closing). This gives some idea what was discussed during the period. By filtering on the speeches which was held by Moderaterna and reading some of them makes it clear that Moderaterna is against a closing of Bromma airport.
The text analytics and the index provided by WCA helps us both discover trending topics over time and gives us a tool for understanding who talked about a subject and what was said.
All the different topics about infrastructure can together create a single topic for infrastructure. Speeches that are mentioning tåg (train), bredband (broadband) or any other defined term for infrastructure are also tagged with the topic infrastructure. This wider concept of infrastructure can of course also be viewed over time.
Another way of finding which party that are most correlated to a subject is by comparing pair of facets. The following table shows parties highly related to terms regarding infrastructure and type of fuels.
Let’s start by explain the first row in order to understand the table. Mobilnät (mobile net) has only been mentioned 44 times by Centerpartiet, but Centerpartiet is still highly related to the term with a WCA correlation value of 3.7. This means that Centerpartiet has a higher share of its speeches mentioning mobilnät compared to other parties. The table indicates that two parties Centerpartiet and Miljöpartiet are more involved about the subject infrastructure topics than other political parties.
Filtering on the concept infrastructure also shows that Miljöpartiet and Centerpartiet are the two parties which has the highest share of speeches mentioning the defined infrastructure topics.
Interested to dig deeper into the data? Parsing written text with text analytics is a successful approach for increasing an understanding of subjects such as politics. Using IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics makes it easy. Most of the functionality used in this example is also out of the box functionalities in WCA.