Abstract
The conference on the climate change, UNFCCC
2010, took place from 29 November to 10 December
2010 in Cancun, Mexico. This paper presents an
analysis of the opening speeches by various countries
at the conference, combined with the statistics of the
countries regarding their socioeconomic indicators
and memberships of different climate treaties. A
central objective is to compare different sources of the
information that reflect the underlying complex system
where there are obvious and less obvious relationships
between the rhetoric and some aspects of reality. At the
level of argumentation, we are interested in the
occurrence of topics related to the climate change, i.e.,
whether some topics are mentioned or avoided in the
speeches. The recognition of the topics is based on a
semi-automatic term selection process that provides
the input for the subsequent steps of the analysis. The
data preparation process includes optical character
recognition, machine translation and approximate
string matching. We assume that the collection of terms
serves as a relevant set of features that reflect the
content of the speeches. These text-based features are
then compared with the country statistics. The basic
hypothesis is that there is a detectable but complex
relationship between the content of the speeches and
known facts. The most important contributions in this
paper are the formulation of the basic questions and
the overall hypothesis, an analysis of the relationships
between the countries as well as between the topics
and indicators, and the qualitative analysis of the
results.
Yasir Mehmood, Timo Honkela. (2012) Comparing Talks, Realities and Concerns over the Climate Change: Comparing Texts with Numerical and Categorical Data, Conference on Language and Technology 2012.
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Publisher
Center for Language Engineering
Country
Pakistan
City
Lahore
From
09-11-2012
To
10-11-2012