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Testing the Validity of Automatic Speech Recognition for Political Text Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2019

Sven-Oliver Proksch Open the ORCID record for Sven-Oliver Proksch [Opens in a new window] ,
Christopher Wratil Open the ORCID record for Christopher Wratil [Opens in a new window]  and
Jens Wäckerle Open the ORCID record for Jens Wäckerle [Opens in a new window]
Sven-Oliver Proksch*
Affiliation:
Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, University of Cologne, Germany. Email: so.proksch@uni-koeln.de
Christopher Wratil
Affiliation:
Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, University of Cologne, Germany. Email: so.proksch@uni-koeln.de Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Jens Wäckerle
Affiliation:
Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, University of Cologne, Germany. Email: so.proksch@uni-koeln.de
*
*Email: so.proksch@uni-koeln.de
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Abstract

The analysis of political texts from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, social media, or press releases forms the basis of major and growing fields in political science, not least since advances in “text-as-data” methods have rendered the analysis of large text corpora straightforward. However, a lot of sources of political speech are not regularly transcribed, and their on-demand transcription by humans is prohibitively expensive for research purposes. This class includes political speech in certain legislatures, during political party conferences as well as television interviews and talk shows. We showcase how scholars can use automatic speech recognition systems to analyze such speech with quantitative text analysis models of the “bag-of-words” variety. To probe results for robustness to transcription error, we present an original “word error rate simulation” (WERSIM) procedure implemented in $R$. We demonstrate the potential of automatic speech recognition to address open questions in political science with two substantive applications and discuss its limitations and practical challenges.

Keywords

GoogleYouTubetext analysistranscriptionsautomatic speech recognitioncampaigns
Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 339 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. 

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Footnotes

Authors’ note: We are grateful to Leonie Diffené, Felix Reich and Pit Rieger for their excellent research assistance. We are also very thankful for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work by two anonymous reviewers as well as Jeff Gill. Christopher Wratil would like to acknowledge funding by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung (20.16.0.045WW). All remaining errors are our own. The replication files for this article are available on the Political Analysis Dataverse (Proksch, Wratil, and Wäckerle 2018).

Contributing Editor: Jeff Gill

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