Analyze Democrat vs Republic speeches: trying out NLTK

Task:  to identify interesting collocations from text

Corpus:  speeches made by politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives during debates over legislation

Data: downloaded from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/data/convote.html

Analysis: using google's nltk package, collocations module.

Association measures:

• chi square
• mutual information
• log likelihood
• raw frequency

Green:  appear in both parties' speech, but in different order.

Red: only in Republican speech

Blue: only in Democrat speech.

Black: almost equal importance given by both parties

This table is the result of using raw frequency count of 2 consecutive words appearing together in the corpus, sorted by frequency.

Top 16 collocations by                          Democrats            united-states stem-cell health-care american-people cell-research social-security tax-cuts patriot-act embryonic-stem conference-report estate-tax last-year bill-would endangered-species national-security homeland-security

Top 16 collocations by      Republicans         united-states stem-cell embryonic-stem small-businesses small-business would-like cell-research patriot-act may-consume american-people health-care death-tax homeland-security federal-government law-enforcement conference-report