Dataset of Philippine Presidents Speeches from 1935 to 2016

TL;DR

This paper presents a dataset of Philippine Presidents' speeches from 1935 to 2016, analyzed for key topics and insights into presidential priorities and common challenges over time.

Contribution

It provides a cleaned, processed dataset and applies topic modeling to reveal main themes and trends in presidential speeches across decades.

Findings

Top word is 'development'

Identified three main topics: economic development, public service, challenges

Presidents faced similar issues over the years

Abstract

The dataset was collected to examine and identify possible key topics within these texts. Data preparation such as data cleaning, transformation, tokenization, removal of stop words from both English and Filipino, and word stemming was employed in the dataset before feeding it to sentiment analysis and the LDA model. The topmost occurring word within the dataset is "development" and there are three (3) likely topics from the speeches of Philippine presidents: economic development, enhancement of public services, and addressing challenges. The dataset was able to provide valuable insights contained among official documents. While the study showed that presidents have used their annual address to express their visions for the country. It also presented that the presidents from 1935 to 2016 faced the same problems during their term. Future researchers may collect other speeches made by presidents during their term; combine them to the dataset used in this study to further investigate these important texts by subjecting them to the same methodology used in this study. The dataset may be requested from the authors and it is recommended for further analysis. For example, determine how the speeches of the president reflect the preamble or foundations of the Philippine constitution.