Words ranking and Hirsch index for identifying the core of the hapaxes in political texts
Valerio Ficcadenti, Roy Cerqueti, Marcel Ausloos, Gurjeet Dhesi

TL;DR
This study analyzes rare words in US Presidents' speeches, identifying a core set of hapaxes using rank-size laws and a Hirsch index variant, revealing socio-political insights.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method combining Zipf-Mandelbrot law and a Hirsch index variant to identify the core of hapaxes in political texts.
Findings
The core hapaxes follow a Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution.
Deviations in the distribution reveal socio-political nuances.
The method effectively characterizes rare word usage in speeches.
Abstract
This paper deals with a quantitative analysis of the content of official political speeches. We study a set of about one thousand talks pronounced by the US Presidents, ranging from Washington to Trump. In particular, we search for the relevance of the rare words, i.e. those said only once in each speech -- the so-called hapaxes. We implement a rank-size procedure of Zipf-Mandelbrot type for discussing the hapaxes' frequencies regularity over the overall set of speeches. Starting from the obtained rank-size law, we define and detect the core of the hapaxes set by means of a procedure based on an Hirsch index variant. We discuss the resulting list of words in the light of the overall US Presidents' speeches. We further show that this core of hapaxes itself can be well fitted through a Zipf-Mandelbrot law and that contains elements producing deviations at the low ranks between scatter…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
