Speeches by charismatic and not so charismatic politicians can sometimes create unexpected and revolutionary changes in nation states. Charismatic politicians can convey sentiments by a subtle choice of words – the so called emotion laden words and ordinary words- can precipitate major socio-political changes. In political debates the politicians use words that may discredit their opponents and use words the help political friends.
We have access to a continuous collection of speeches and debates by Irish politicians in the then UK/Ireland parliament between 1800-1922 (c.450 million words in all). A period of great turmoil in Irish history and it encompasses tragedies like the Irish Famine and achievements like creating the Irish Republic. Previous projects correlated the political sentiment with food prices covering the Famine period. You might look at these speeches then and now to examine the speakers attitude to the students.
You will be developing systems to interrogate and analyse the Irish Parliamentary speeches and debates looking for sentiments and key topics covered in the our collection of the Irish Parliamentary data. You will compare and contrast your results with the results obtained by querying ChatGPT on matters of Irish history to evaluate your system.
The analysis of political texts in the public domain is an important ingredient for policy development, foreign-direct investments, opinion polling and so on. The linking of emotions with real-world data (food and commodity prices, population numbers and the stratification of these numbers into empolyment figures, ethnicity data for example.