Text Mining: Group Research Project
One of the main questions that my group is considering basing our project on is: how often do presidents and opposing candidates break or keep their promises while in office or running for office? The idea of text mining is to thoroughly read different articles or other forms of written research and to find patterns throughout the research. These patterns consist of repeating statements or words that a person, in this president or opposing candidate), would say. This is a very beneficial way of doing our research because when a candidate is running for president or any type of office they usually use specific phrases to get the public’s attention and they constantly repeat these phrases whenever they are in public.
Like, my group member Tatsiana stated in her post, we attempt to compare what the president did during his term and what he said when he was campaigning. Unfortunatly the class is only until december, so we will not be able to do the project for the entire 4 year term of the president for this current election, but hopefully we will get an idea of what he will do up until the due date of this proejct. Along with this current election, we will also look at past presidencies and make the same coomparison. It is important that I say this becase both professors use this current election as a topic for postings and for topics of discussion in class, so it would only seem appropriate to integrate this election into our project.
As I wrote in response to Tatsiana’s post, I think it is important that you define what qualifies as a campaign promise. Your idea of searching for particular phrases that are repeated seems like one possible way to handle this. Of course, the devil will likely be in the details. What phrases will you have the software zero in on? What sources will be chosen to represent candidates’ speaking to the public?
You write, “The idea of text mining is to thoroughly read different articles or other forms of written research and to find patterns throughout the research.” It is important to mention that computer processing plays a role here, or else it sounds as if a human is doing all of the thorough reading.