Figure 2

Word shift graphs of the sentiment of presidential speeches by United States Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. We display a basic word shift graph on the left, using the labMT sentiment dictionary [4] (one score per word); on the right is a generalized word shift graph, using the SocialSent decade-adapted sentiment dictionaries [35] (one score per word per decade). Word shifts show the top fifty contributing words to the difference in sentiment. Words to the left are those that contribute to Bush’s speeches being more negative than Johnson’s, while words to the right partly offset that negativity. Bars at the top show the overall sentiment difference and the effect of each type of word contribution on that difference. The bottom left corner includes a legend for interpreting the different types of contributions in the context of the presidential speeches. In the generalized word shift graph, words that are borrowing a score across decades are marked by an asterisk (∗). We use the center of each of labMT’s and SocialSent’s sentiment distributions as the reference scores: \(\Phi ^{(\text{ref})} = 5\) for labMT and \(\Phi ^{(\text{ref})} = 0\) for SocialSent