Words are important, said (quoted ad nauseam) Nanni Moretti in Palombella rossa, in the part of a PCI official. The PCI no longer exists, and neither does the PDS for that matter (or the DS), which has reached its current emanation after long wanderings (deprived of the word "left", perhaps considered disqualified), but the words remain important, especially in politics.
Also for this Expert System, a company active in semantic technology, has analyzed through a software (Cogito) the llanguage used by Tabacci, Puppato, Renzi, Vendola and Bersani during the debate aired last night on Sky TG24, in view of the primaries of the Democratic Party, a battle (characterised, for the sake of the truth, by a great fair play), which is also and above all fought with words.
There are many data that emerged from the comparison. The former are of a quantitative nature and reveal that Matteo Renzi spoke the most, with the same time (marked by the impending stopwatch behind the candidates)., who used 36% more words than bottom-up Nichi Vendola. Behind the mayor of Florence, in this special classification, Bersani finished, followed, in order, by Puppato and Tabacci.
Expert system then used Fog's Gunning readability index (which indicates the number of years of formal education a person needs in order to read a text easily) to calculate the level of accessibility, for voters – spectators, of the language of the candidates. THE Bersani and Tabacci turned out to be easier to understand, the understanding of which requires 10 years of schooling (i.e. the tertiary level), while Puppato, Renzi and Vendola require 12 (equivalent to the high school diploma level). However, the schooling threshold required by our politicians remains high, much higher than what was shown in the US electoral campaign by both Obama and Romney.
At the syntactic level, the 5 candidates highlighted few differences: in fact, they range from 3,9 propositions per period of Puppato to 3,3 of Tabacci, passing through 3,8 of Bersani, 3,6 of Vendola and the 3,4 by Renzi.
More fascinating and diversified, as well as politically relevant, is the framework of the main concepts covered by the five candidates. The common thread that unites all the challengers is the concept of "country", (in first place for Tabacci, Renzi and Puppato, among the first for Bersani and Vendola). Tabacci, Bersani and Vendola, then, are united by the insistence on the theme of the "Coalition", just as Renzi and Puppato are linked to each other by the extensive use of terms attributable to the theme of work.
Always remaining on the path of the most used words, yes reported by Tabacci for concreteness, with "Taxes", Ici and "Evasion", and Puppato, which touches on economic issues with terms such as "Savings", "Income", "Workplace" and "Tax receipt". In the middle of the ford Renzi and Bersani, who are divided between economic concepts and political concepts, while Vendola plays the part of the dreamer, accompanying "Destino" with terms such as "Politics" and "Centre-left".
A role, that of the Apulian governor, also reaffirmed by the choice of verbs: after "Essere" (the most used by all candidates) among Vendola's semantic choices, the recurrence of "Thinking" stands out, while Renzi, rather assertive, prefers "Do". For Bersani, (a little ballasted by the excessive use of the interlayer "therefore") the verb is "To say", while for Tabacci and Puppato "To have" stands out, followed in both cases by "To do".
Also useful the analysis of the sentiment transmitted by the words spoken by the candidates: for Renzi, Tabacci and Puppato it is neutral (the positive and negative terms are essentially the same), while that of Bersani ("problem, crisis, discomfort" and Vendola ("serious, excessive, unbearable") is negative).
In the end, a fascinating and not obvious picture emerges, which reveals proximity (or distances) sometimes different from what had been imagined, a way to try to better understand, through the study of their own words, the candidates in the primaries of the centre-left.
