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Clause Analysis: Using Syntactic Information to Automatically Extract Source, Subject, and Predicate from Texts with an Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2017

Wouter van Atteveldt Open the ORCID record for Wouter van Atteveldt [Opens in a new window] ,
Tamir Sheafer ,
Shaul R. Shenhav  and
Yair Fogel-Dror Open the ORCID record for Yair Fogel-Dror [Opens in a new window]
Wouter van Atteveldt*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication Science, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: wouter@vanatteveldt.com
Tamir Sheafer
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Department of Communication, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Shaul R. Shenhav
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Yair Fogel-Dror
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
*
*Email: wouter@vanatteveldt.com
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Abstract

This article presents a new method and open source R package that uses syntactic information to automatically extract source–subject–predicate clauses. This improves on frequency-based text analysis methods by dividing text into predicates with an identified subject and optional source, extracting the statements and actions of (political) actors as mentioned in the text. The content of these predicates can be analyzed using existing frequency-based methods, allowing for the analysis of actions, issue positions and framing by different actors within a single text. We show that a small set of syntactic patterns can extract clauses and identify quotes with good accuracy, significantly outperforming a baseline system based on word order. Taking the 2008–2009 Gaza war as an example, we further show how corpus comparison and semantic network analysis applied to the results of the clause analysis can show differences in citation and framing patterns between U.S. and English-language Chinese coverage of this war.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 207 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. 

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Footnotes

Authors’ note: The research was partly supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Space, Israel. The data and R scripts for replicating the validation and substantive analyses are published in the Harvard Dataverse (Van Atteveldt, Sheafer, Shenhav, and Fogel-Dror 2016).

Contributing Editor: R. Michael Alvarez

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