Lexical Analysis of US Political Speeches

This article describes a US political corpus comprising 245 speeches given by senators John McCain and Barack Obama during the years 2007–2008. We present the main characteristics of this collection and compare the common English words most frequently used by these political leaders with ordinary usage (Brown corpus). We then discuss and compare certain metrics capable of extracting terms best characterizing a given subset of the entire text corpus. Terms overused and underused by both candidates during the last US presidential election are determined and analysed from both a statistical and dynamic perspective.