A Rhetorical Analysis Approach to Natural Language Processing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Rhetorical Analysis as a novel NLP approach that does not require large training datasets and effectively addresses tasks like author identification, election prediction, text generation, and summarization.

Contribution

It presents Rhetorical Analysis as a new method for NLP that can solve multiple problems without extensive training data, demonstrating high accuracy and versatility.

Findings

Author identification accuracy of 100%

Election prediction accuracy of 55%

Generated text similarity to Shakespeare of 87.3%

Abstract

The goal of this research was to find a way to extend the capabilities of computers through the processing of language in a more human way, and present applications which demonstrate the power of this method. This research presents a novel approach, Rhetorical Analysis, to solving problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main benefit of Rhetorical Analysis, as opposed to previous approaches, is that it does not require the accumulation of large sets of training data, but can be used to solve a multitude of problems within the field of NLP. The NLP problems investigated with Rhetorical Analysis were the Author Identification problem - predicting the author of a piece of text based on its rhetorical strategies, Election Prediction - predicting the winner of a presidential candidate's re-election campaign based on rhetorical strategies within that president's inaugural address, Natural Language Generation - having a computer produce text containing rhetorical strategies, and Document Summarization. The results of this research indicate that an Author Identification system based on Rhetorical Analysis could predict the correct author 100% of the time, that a re-election predictor based on Rhetorical Analysis could predict the correct winner of a re-election campaign 55% of the time, that a Natural Language Generation system based on Rhetorical Analysis could output text with up to 87.3% similarity to Shakespeare in style, and that a Document Summarization system based on Rhetorical Analysis could extract highly relevant sentences. Overall, this study demonstrated that Rhetorical Analysis could be a useful approach to solving problems in NLP.