Zeitenwenden: Detecting changes in the German political discourse

From a monarchy to a democracy, to a dictatorship and back to a democracy -- the German political landscape has been constantly changing ever since the first German national state was formed in 1871. After World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was formed in 1949. Since then every plenary session of the German Bundestag was logged and even has been digitized over the course of the last few years. We analyze these texts using a time series variant of the topic model LDA to investigate which events had a lasting effect on the political discourse and how the political topics changed over time. This allows us to detect changes in word frequency (and thus key discussion points) in political discourse.

SpeakGer: A meta-data enriched speech corpus of German state and federal parliaments

The application of natural language processing on political texts as well as speeches has become increasingly relevant in political sciences due to the ability to analyze large text corpora which cannot be read by a single person. But such text corpora often lack critical meta information, detailing for instance the party, age or constituency of the speaker, that can be used to provide an analysis tailored to more fine-grained research questions. To enable researchers to answer such questions with quantitative approaches such as natural language processing, we provide the SpeakGer data set, consisting of German parliament debates from all 16 federal states of Germany as well as the German Bundestag from 1947-2023, split into a total of 10,806,105 speeches. This data set includes rich meta data in form of information on both reactions from the audience towards the speech as well as information about the speaker's party, their age, their constituency and their party's political alignment, which enables a deeper analysis. We further provide three exploratory analyses, detailing topic shares of different parties throughout time, a descriptive analysis of the development of the age of an average speaker as well as a sentiment analysis of speeches of different parties with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lex2Sent: A bagging approach to unsupervised sentiment analysis

Unsupervised sentiment analysis is traditionally performed by counting those words in a text that are stored in a sentiment lexicon and then assigning a label depending on the proportion of positive and negative words registered. While these "counting" methods are considered to be beneficial as they rate a text deterministically, their classification rates decrease when the analyzed texts are short or the vocabulary differs from what the lexicon considers default. The model proposed in this paper, called Lex2Sent, is an unsupervised sentiment analysis method to improve the classification of sentiment lexicon methods. For this purpose, a Doc2Vec-model is trained to determine the distances between document embeddings and the embeddings of the positive and negative part of a sentiment lexicon. These distances are then evaluated for multiple executions of Doc2Vec on resampled documents and are averaged to perform the classification task. For three benchmark datasets considered in this paper, the proposed Lex2Sent outperforms every evaluated lexicon, including state-of-the-art lexica like VADER or the Opinion Lexicon in terms of classification rate.