Studying political discourse of the President address in Russia with the text mining technique

Abstract

The article describes the technique and results of the study of political discourse using text mining
technology with the statistical package R. Unlike traditional content analysis, text mining uses automated
methods for processing text in natural languages. The article presents a specific technique of computational
operations and an algorithm of visualization. The study aims to study the corpus of texts of the
President Address to the Federal Assembly in Russia. The study describes the evolution of the political
agenda in post-Soviet Russia within the discourse analysis approach. The study shows that the idea of
‘democracy and human rights’ fails to be the key concepts of public policy in Russia. The presidents of
Russia usually stick around 3 common topics: Russia, state, and power. The author approves that text
mining allows us to automate part of the research work and it functions as one of the directions for a
comprehensive analysis of political discourse. The applied technique can be used to automate research
in political linguistics, as well as to study different types of political documents and texts.
Key words: text mining, political discourse, president address, political communication, mathematical
linguistics.