How Many Writers does the Prime Minister have for his Speeches?

An Authorial Analysis

Ali Arsalan Kazmi

Background

A series of events in Pakistan prompted the Prime Minister to address the nation...

After the speech, however, an Audio clip was leaked, allegedly of the PM taking advice on diction from his aides

Surprise & Criticism

This was followed by another major event...

Another speech was delivered...

And an Audio clip supposedly for this speech was also leaked...

Questions asked in News Channels & Social Media

  • Does the Prime Minister consult his advisors on diction for every speech or for ones delivered during extraordinary circumstances only?
  • From his advisors, does the PM rely more on his family members?
  • Has the PM's reliance on certain family members and aides increased only recently, as his government has come under increasing fire for involvement in large scale corruption?
  • Is it possible to obtain information of such collaborations for other speeches of the PM?

Motivation




Using Traditional Journalism to identify if different authors are involved in the PM's speeches is likely to be:

  • perilous
  • time-consuming

Data Journalism, on the other hand, can attempt to answer this question relatively comfortably with:

Procedure

Datasets

Datasets

Different datasets genereted using:

  • Parts of Speech (POS) Tagging
  • Word Bigrams
  • Character 4-grams

Bootstrap Consensus Network using POS Bigrams

Heatmap using Most Frequent Word Bigrams

Bootstrap Consensus Network using Most Frequent Character 4-grams

Two Authors?


  • Almost all analyses point to two separated clusters of speeches
  • Does depend significantly on amount of data
  • Indicates there may be two (or more) authors
  • Blog post can be accessed here