On Gobbledygook and Mood of the Philippine Senate: An Exploratory Study on the Readability and Sentiment of Selected Philippine Senators Microposts

This paper presents the findings of a readability assessment and sentiment analysis of selected six Philippine senators’ microposts over the popular Twitter microblog. Using the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), tweets of Senators Cayetano, Defensor-Santiago, Pangilinan, Marcos, Guingona, and Escudero were assessed. A sentiment analysis was also done to determine the polarity of the senators’ respective microposts. Results showed that on the average, the six senators are tweeting at an eight to ten SMOG level. This means that, at least a sixth grader will be able to understand the senators’ tweets. Moreover, their tweets are mostly neutral and their sentiments vary in unison at some period of time. This could mean that a senator’s tweet sentiment is affected by specific Philippine-based events.

💡 Research Summary

The paper “On Gobbledygook and Mood of the Philippine Senate: An Exploratory Study on the Readability and Sentiment of Selected Philippine Senators’ Microposts” investigates the linguistic accessibility and emotional tone of Twitter posts made by six Philippine senators between August 15, 2013 and August 15, 2014. The authors focus on two main research questions: (1) What is the readability level of the senators’ tweets as measured by the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) formula, and (2) What is the overall sentiment distribution of these tweets, and does it vary in response to specific events?

Methodology
The study uses the Twitter API v1.1 to collect all tweets from the official accounts of Senators Pia Cayetano, Miriam Defensor‑Santiago, Chiz Escudero, Kiko Pangilinan, TG Guingona, and Bongbong Marcos. The dataset comprises every tweet posted during the one‑year window, resulting in a corpus of several thousand short texts (each ≤140 characters).

Readability Assessment
Because SMOG was originally designed for longer passages (30‑sentence samples), the authors adopt a short‑text adaptation (ψs = 3 + s·√