Obama continues to deliver consistently more words than McCain. Although in this debate some 300 words fewer were spoken by Obama than in the first debate, Obama said +11.3% more words than McCain. Obama' unique vocabulary size remained at 1,375, only one word less than in the first debate.

McCain's vocabulary size in this debate was only 1,295, a change of -6.2% from the first debate. Note that although fewer words were said, Obama delivered just as many unique words in this debate as the first one, suggesting that McCain's drop was not necessarily due less allotted time. Table 1 Legend

a c b d

a :: total number of words b :: proportion of words in the debate c :: unique words in (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

Non-stop word fraction in this debate was slightly lower than in the first debate, by about 2% for both candidates. Table 2 Legend

a c b d

a :: total number of words, for a given category (all, stop, non-stop) b :: (a) relative to words in the debate if category=all, otherwise relative to words by the candidate c :: number of unique words with set (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

Average frequency remains very similar for both candidates, here at 2.67 for Obama and 2.591 for Mccain, compared to 2.63 and 2.51 during the first debate. Table 3 Legend

a b c

a :: average word frequency b :: largest word frequency in 50% of content c :: largest word frequency in 90% of content bar :: proportion of a:b:c

Sentences of both candidates were shorter, by about 0.6 words for Obama and 2.8 for McCain. Once stop words were removed, the non-stop length sentence length for Obama was the same as the first debate, but nearly a whole word shorter for Mccain (6.2 vs 7.1). Here McCain was obviously either being cut short, simplifying his delivery or flustered.

a b c

a :: average sentence size b :: largest sentence size for 50% of content c :: largest sentence size for 90% of content bar :: proportion of a:b:c

There is no significant change for part of speech components from the first debate. Obama dropped noun use by just 2%, while McCain added 2% to his nouns. All other part of speech differences were smaller than a percent.

Unique part of speech component was quite different for verbs. Obama's unique fraction for verbs was 46%, up from 41.7% during the first debate. McCain on the other hand has 42.4% of his verbs unique, compared to 45.5% for the first debate. That's a significant difference and suggests more partial and less complex sentences. Table 5 Legend

a c b d

a :: total number of words for a given POS (all, noun, verb, adjective, adverb) b :: (a) relative to all words by candidate c :: unique words in (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

Part of speech frequency increased for both candidates. Certainly McCain' frequencies were quite a bit higher across the board from the first debate (nouns +1.2%, verbs +6.3%, adverbs +24.7%, except for adjectives which reduced in frequency by -4.1%. Obama, on the other hand, had a more modest increase (nouns -0.8%, verbs +7.6%, adjectives +3.6% and adverbs -3.1%.

We're seeing a greater increase in frequency for McCain. This, coupled with significantly fewer unique words delivered suggests a poor for this debate performance. Table 5 Legend

a b c

a :: average word frequency b :: largest word frequency in 50% of content c :: largest word frequency in 90% of content bar :: proportion of a:b:c

McCain's word pairings were substantially lower than Obama's. He delivered only about half of the adjective/verb, adjective/adjective, adverb/verb, adverb/adjective pairs. His adverb/adverb pairings were only 30% that of Obama. To some degree this is expected because McCain consistently delivers shorter sentences and fewer words. However, during this debate the pairing difference is substantially greater between the candidates thatn during the first debate.

The only paring which remained relatively the same was the noun/noun pairing. All others dropped by about 10% (and many by significantly more, like adverb/adverb from 58.3% of Obama in the first debate to 30.0%).

McCain's speech in this debate is clearly lacking variety and complexity. Table 6a,b Legend

a c b d

a :: total number of pairs, for a given category (e.g. verb/noun) b :: (a) relative to all pairs c :: number of unique pairs within set (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

a c   d b e

a :: total number of pairs for Barack Obama b :: relative unique pairs for Barack Obama c :: total pairs for John McCain d :: (c) relative to (a) (i.e. John McCain relative to Barack Obama) e :: relative unique pairs for John McCain bars :: values of (a), (b), (c) and (e)

Obama shatters McCain in the number of unique exclusive verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Given that we have been seeing very small differences up to now, these differences are huge. Obama delivered 224 exclusive verbs (i.e. only spoken by him), compared to McCain at 185. In the first debate he edged McCain with 127 more unique exclusive adjectives compared to 106, but in this debate the gap widens with 130 vs 95. For adverbs, McCain is a disaster this time around with only 19 unique exclusive adverbs compared to 35 in the first debate.

What is greatly telling are the contributions of unique parts of speech by each candidate to the overall debate. In the first debate, the values were relatively close for nouns and verbs, with Obama contributing to 6% more adjectives and adverbs than McCain. In this debate, Obama's contribution for verbs, adjectives and adverbs is about 7%, 11% and 24%, respectively! That last number is spectacular — in this debate Obama individually contributed to over half of the adverbs spoken in the debate. Table 7c Legend

a d b e c f

a :: total number of words unique to a candidate, for a given POS group b :: (a) relative to all unique words to the candidate c :: (a) relative to all words d :: unique words in (a) e :: (d) relative to (a) f :: (d) relative to all unique words bar1 :: normalized ratio of (a-d):d bar2 :: absolute ratio of (a-d):d for all POS groups (first column) or POS group (other columns)

The gap between Obama and McCain for unique top-level noun phrases nearly doubled in this debate. The derived noun phrase use was similar. McCain was clearly not in his best form. Table 8c Legend

a c b d

a :: number of noun phrases b :: (a) relative to number of all noun phrases c :: number of unique phrases d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: normalized ratio of (a-c):c

Number of noun phrases relative to the number of nouns remains relatively constant.

a b	a :: ratio of the number of noun phrases to number of nouns b :: ratio of the number of unique noun phrases to number of unique nouns bar :: ratio of a:b

Noun phrase frequency and size remains relatively constant.

a b c

a :: average b :: 50% weighted cumulative value c :: 90% weighted cumulative value bar1 :: normalized ratio of a:b:c

McCain's performance in the third debate was much worse than the first two debates. His WI this time around was 505, which should be compared to values of 368 and 352 for his other debates. Obama's index was higher in this debate as well, but not significantly.

Like before, McCain has better uniqueness statistics for word usage, but does much worse for adverbs and unique noun phrases. In particular, t9 for McCain is 9% lower than Obama (in the first debate it was 7.5% lower). Table 11c Legend

Obama continues to focus on "important" and uses "now" a great deal. "Nuclear" is no longer on the menu, and is replaced by "people", and "health". Obama's cloud has a significant noun component.

McCain has a lot fewer nouns than Obama in the center of his cloud. He still doesn't say "Barack", but says "tough", "difficult" and continues on "nuclear". It is interesting to see the large fraction of adjectives in McCain's tag cloud (i.e. frequently used). Although adjectives appear prominently in McCain cloud, he actually contributed fewer unique adjectives to the debate.

Unique words to Obama in this debate suggest he continues to approach subjects with greater respect for complexity and inter-relationships. He uses "probably", for example, which McCain does not say. Words like "apparently", "priorities", "additional", "terms", "recently" all suggest that Obama is more comfortable with nuance and multivariate topics.

McCain' unique tag cloud actually nearly fits into the image! As mentioned above, McCain did not contribute as many unique words to this debate as past debates. The words he used were "nuclear" (which Obama did not use, perhaps with the feeling that people have had enough fearmongering and wish to hear explanations of domestic policy plans), "extreme", "unprecedented", "terribly" and "unilaterally". These are unwavering superlatives.

It is clear from these two tag clouds that Obama's delivery in this debate was richer and that he overwhelmed McCain' contribute with a greater range of topics.

Do you see many blue words? Those are nouns exclusive to McCain and there is is hardly a blue word in sight. It is shocking how overwhelming Obama's delivery drowns out McCain's contribution in the realm of nouns.

For verbs, McCain's contribution also lagged behind Obama's, whose use of "agree" and "disagree" suggest a conciliatory and balanced stance.

McCain's top contributions, other than the regular "Obama", were "nuclear" and "angry". To the end, "nuclear" continues to be a favourite of McCain, and entirely dropped in this debate by Obama, who, on the other hand, stands out with "economic" (I cannot believe McCain did not use this word), "additional", and "financial".

McCain completely loses the fight for adverbs and his unique contributions only pepper a sea of words used exclusively by Obama.

When all parts of speech are compared, the verbal victor of the night is easy to call. Obama spoke with more extensive use of a greater number of concepts, drowning out McCain nearly entirely. You can see, for example, that although McCain uses "nuclear" exclusively, and this is one of his favourite words, when relative frequency is compared to words spoken by Obama (i.e. relative to frequencies by the same speaker), "nuclear" is drowned out by Obama's terms. This means that as much as McCain repeated "nuclear", Obama in his delivery drove a much larger number of points across.

Obama is driving his points harder than in the first debate. The word pair tag clouds are less populated and filled with larger words, suggesting more pairs with higher relative frequency. For example adjective/adjective pair tag cloud has only 8 pairs, compared to over 20 in the first debate.

McCain's noun/verb pairings suggests an attack stance with "obama wants", "anything say", "anything saying". In fact, by having "obama" as a word in his primary noun/verb pairings, McCain is seen to be talking more about what his opponent is doing than what he would himself do.

Contrast this to Obama, who does not have "McCain" or "John" in his top noun/verb pairs, chosing instead to talk about "people think" and "tax give" and "energy make".