Presenter: Konstantina Dritsa
Date: 10 July 2018

“It's not what you say, but how you say it”. How often have you heard that phrase? Have you ever wished that you could take an objective and comprehensive look into what is said and how it is said in politics? Within this project, we examined the records of the Hellenic Parliament sittings from 1989 up to 2017 in order to evaluate the speech quality and examine the palette of sentiments that characterize the communication among its members. The readability of the speeches is evaluated with the use of the “Simple Measure of Gobbledygook” (SMOG) formula, partially adjusted to the Greek language. The sentiment mining is achieved with the use of two Greek sentiment lexicons. Our findings indicate a significant drop on the average readability score of the parliament records from 2003 up to 2017. On the other hand, the sentiment analysis presents steady scores throughout the years. The communication among parliament members is characterized mainly by the feeling of surprise followed closely by anger and disgust. At the same time our results show a steady prevalence of positive words over negative. The results are presented in graphs, mainly in comparison between political parties as well as between time intervals.