Towards an Automated Semiotic Analysis of the Romanian Political Discourse

As it is known, on the political scene the success of a speech can be measured by the degree in which the speaker is able to change attitudes, opinions, feelings and political beliefs in his auditorium. We suggest a range of analysis tools, all belonging to semiotics, from lexical-semantic, to syntactical and rhetorical, that integrated in the exploratory panoply of discursive weapons of a political speaker could influence the impact of her/his speeches over a sensible auditory. Our approach is based on the assumption that semiotics, in its quality of methodology and meta-language, can capitalize a situational analysis over the political discourse. Such an analysis assumes establishing the communication situation, in our case, the Parliament’s vote in favour of suspending the Romanian President, through which we can describe an action of communication. We depict a platform, the Discourse Analysis Tool (DAT), which integrates a range of natural language processing tools with the intent to identify significant characteristics of the political discourse. The tool is able to produce comparative diagrams between the speeches of two or more subjects or analysing the same subject in different contexts. Only the lexical-semantic methods are operational in the platform today, but our investigation suggests new dimensions touching the syntactic, rhetorical and coherence perspective.