A Solution to Determine Radicalization Preceding Violence or

Peace in Iranian Discourse

Presented by

Vicki Nisbett, M.A.

New Mexico State University

Las Cruces, New Mexico

1

A Solution to Determine Radicalization toward Violence or Peace in Iranian Discourse

This white paper discusses why using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) will help

determine if there is radicalization in specific Iranian discourse. LSA gives a left to right

analysis of discourse over time and provides you with the tools and expertise to determine if

there is an escalation in violent discourse or peaceful discourse. LSA analyzes discourse no

matter what language is used.

Methods Discussion

Manual Castells argues that the capability of effectively engaging in intimidation or

violence “requires the framing of individual and collective minds.” 1

From the representationalist

view of language, Hacker presents in his essay on political linguistic discourse analysis that

traditional communication-theory scholars argue that “people learn word meanings by

associating words with objects and experiences.” 2

Castells and Lakoff argue that narratives,

which are built into frames, get intertwined in complex frames or related words (semantic fields)

linked to language.1,3

The frames are mapped in our brains; thus, we act upon our past and

present experiences (see Appendix A).1,3

Through decision-making, involving feelings,

emotions, and reasoning, we take action. Therefore, experience, and emotions are used to frame

political behavior.

Radicalization. The first step that can lead to violence that is twofold is radicalization,

according to Countering International Terrorism.4 (1) If someone is alienated from society, they

may adopt extreme views and become radicalized. A small minority of these individuals become

terrorists. Coming from a range of “potential factors,” there is no “single factor that

predominates” to cause radicalization. (2) Within the process of becoming “a radical” is a

“function of being exposed more frequently to a radical political ideology than to a more

conservative one.” 5

A differential socialization model shows that “radicalization is basically a

communication process.” 5

Data showed that any individual who holds radical political views has

a “simple linear function to the extent which he or she has been exposed preponderance favoring

such a view.” 5

Sprinzak notes that right-wing terrorist groups can reach terrorism via a “split

delegitimazation,” implying they have a major conflict with an inferior community and a minor

conflict with the government. 6

He lists several types of groups, but notes their commonality

which is not against governments and is not dedicated in the name of widespread values. These

groups are usually right-wing “collectivities, vigilante groups, or racist organizations” that do not

speak for humanity. By nature, they are particularistic and respond to discernments of insecurity

and threats, and, therefore, they fight their private wars against aggressive ethnic communities,

illicit religious denominations, and classes of undesired classes of people or substandard races. 6

In nation radicalization, Baham notes that the end of the nineteenth-Century Central Europe,

and the end of the twentieth Century, historically had rages of nationalism. Ever since then,

scholars try to understand nationalism and the enrollment of national identity, engrained in

beginnings of current social and political crisis.7 Kenneth Burke’s study on Hitler suggests that

political groups or nations can use framed language leaning toward violence to encourage

hostility in their listeners, especially when escalated messages are given over time.8 It is possible

that a political leader’s language, messages or speeches, can be analyzed preceding violent action

2

by his country or group. Burke noted that Hitler used formulaic expressions to successfully

increase German hostility to the Jewish people. Burke notes how Hitler played on the Germans’

crumpled emotional state, economic distress, and weakened religious belief structure from the

World War I defeats, using a number of formulaic devices. 8

How do you then determine

radicalization over time? LSA is a part of multi-level methods used in determining if there is

radicalization over time, but its contribution is valid with human intersession.

Our Solution

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a statistical approach to language analysis using

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). According to Landauer, Foltz, and Laham, LSA is not

only a method used for extracting as well as representing contextual-usage word meaning

through statistical calculations applied to a great amount of corpus of text, but it is also a theory

as well as a method.9 The theory of LSA suggests that factor analysis can effectively model the

human language (Simon & Xenos, 2004). LSA is deemed artificial intelligence by many

scholars.

When using LSA, words, phrases, and paragraphs are copied from the corpus (body) of

text and then analyzed.9 LSA is related to factor analysis and is also “related to neural net

models,” brain circuitry computer simulations, and is “based on singular value decomposition

(SVD).”9 SVD is a mathematical method producing a semantic space arrangement, which

provides reflection of major comparative patterns in the data,10

SVD is used for data reduction.11

The result reduces the dimension of the semantic space, according to Landauer, Foltz, and

Laham, LSA represents the meaning of a word, from a sort of average of passages in which it

appears and simulates the connections of the human mind.9

Halliday Schilling notes that LSA can simulate many “human cognitive phenomena,”

such as recognizing “vocabulary to word-categorization,” “discourse comprehension,” and

“semantic priming” (meaning that a word is more easily recognized “when it is preceded by a

related stimulus rather than an unrelated stimulus.” 12

LSA can also make judgments of essay-

quality text.9 When analyzing documents, if each word only meant one concept and each concept

was only described by one word, the task would entail a simplistic mapping from words to

concepts.13

The LSA process. LSA searches through the corpus for words and text (terms or frames)

placed in the LSA command line.14

When LSA finds these terms or frames, it performs a

mathematical analysis of the relationship of the terms or frames to the corpus. LSA also finds

other words or text that has similar mathematical relationships to the corpus as the terms or

frames placed in the command line and not just the words that it searches for.

According to Landauer and Dumais, and LSA theory, words and text, which have similar

mathematical relationships within the corpus, also have similar meaning, even if they are totally

different terms or frames.15

LSA outputs numerical cosine values in the range of 0.0 to 1.0 that

reflect the similarity of the corpus to the provided terms or frames as well as other terms or

frames that have a similar mathematical relationship within the corpus.14

LSA output cosine values near 1.0 are the most similar and those near 0.0 are the least

similar. The corpus that is searched by LSA may contain many separate documents or source

information(s), which are separated by line spaces. This allows many documents to be analyzed

simultaneously.15

3

Figure 1. Example of highest 10% of sentence similarity for advocating violence

terms of Iranian politician’s speeches.

2005-2006, 14

2009, 9

2010-2011, 13

2005-2006, 10 2007-2008, 8

2010, 12

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

2005-2006 2007-2008 2010

Pe

rce

nta

ge o

f Se

nte

nce

Sim

ilari

tie

s

Year of Speeches

Percentage of Highest Similarity Sentences for Advocating Violence Terms

for Iranian Politicians: 2005-2006, 2009-2011

AhmadinejadKhamenei

Research for a left to right analysis. In 2012, our research shows by first determining

violent or peaceful discourse for comparison to other discourse, with minimal human

interpretation, LSA will find those terms as well as similar terms just as correctly as humans,

and, at times even better, analyzing the discourse in record time. The similarities can be sorted

into highest percentages and graphed easily showing outcomes over time from terms, sentences,

phrases, or documents. When these graphs are presented, the results are obvious and easy to

understand, as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 clearly shows that sentence similarity increased in 2007 for the Supreme Leader

Khamenei and 2009 for President Ahmadinejad.16

Noting the last similarity increase peak in

2010 and 2011 for both politicians, research showed this is when Iran experienced their fourth

imposed Western sanction and the speeches were given after protesters had rioted because of the

presidential re-election of President Ahmadinejad.

What the iTeam can do for you. As a research team having an array of experience in

communication studies (including political, national security, intelligence, social network

systems, and cultural), linguistics, systems analysis, and computational analysis, we can put an

analysis plan into action showing the results you need now.

Note: Violent discourse frames were compared to two Iranian politician’s speeches.

There was escalation in violent discourse beginning in 2007 through 2011.16

4

Framed Metaphors

(Narratives). Pictures

in our Heads*

War is good

Real-world experience

Word association (War is good) *

Repeated real-world experience

Word association (War is good)*

Repeated real-world experience

Word association (War is good)*

Repeated real-world experience

Word association (War is good)*

and so on …

Real-world experiences with word association of positive words with violent frames lead to complex frames with the

possibility of preceding to violent action

Complex

Frames*

* Emotions and feelings: core values/belief system.

Castells (2009), Communication power. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Lakoff, G. (2008). The political mind. Why you can’t

understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain.

The Penguin Group: New York, N.Y.

(We must have

war)

Possible

Violent

Action

5

Works Cited

1. Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. New York: Oxford University Press.

2. Hacker, K. (1996). Political linguistic discourse analysis. Analyzing the relationship of power

and language. Stuckey, M. (Ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

3. Lakoff, G. (2008). The political mind. Why you can’t understand 21st-century politics

with an 18th

-century brain. The Penguin Group: New York, N.Y.

4. Countering international terrorism: The United Kingdom’s strategy (2006, July),

presented to the prime minister and the secretary of state for the home department by

command of her majesty. HM Government. (Cm 6888), retrieved from

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/136036/countering.pdf

5. Woelfel, Joseph, Woefel, John, Gillham, J., & McPhail, T. (1974). Political radicalization

as a communication process. Communication Research, 1(3). Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage Publications, Inc.

6. Sprinzak, E. (1995). Right‐wing terrorism in a comparative perspective: The case of split

delegitimization. Terrorism and Political Violence. 7(1).

7. Baham, K. F. (1998). Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity

in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe. Austrian History Yearbook, 29, 19-35

doi:10.1017/S0067237800014788

8. Burke, K. (1941). The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle. The philosophy in literary form: Studies

in symbolic action. 191-220.

9. Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W., & Laham, D. (1998). Introduction to latent semantic

analysis. Retrieved from

http://lsa.colorado.edu/

10. Serafin R., & Di Eugenio, B. (2004). FLSA: Extending Latent Semantic Analysis with

features for dialogue act classification. Retrieved from

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1219043

11. Baker, K. (2005). Singular value decomposition tutorial. Rough draft. Retrieved from

www.cs.wits.ac.za/~michael/SVDTut.pdf

12. Halliday Schilling, H.E. (1998). Semantic priming by words and pictures in lexical

decision and pronunciation tasks. Electronic doctoral dissertations for U Mass

Amherst. Paper AAI9909217. Abstract retrieved from

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9909217

13. Latent semantic analysis tutorial (n.d.). Meta Search. Retrieved from

http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and-articles/articles/33-latent-semantic-

analysis-tutorial.html

14. Laham, D. (1997). The LSA at CU Guidebook. (2nd

draft version). Not openly

distributed.

15. Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato's problem: The latent

semantic analysis theory of the acquisition, induction, and representation of

knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211-140.

16. Nisbett, V. (2012). The study of Iranian discourse preceding violent action or peace. Thesis,

Communication Studies, New Mexico State University.