One Day during lunch my commiilitons found out that both recognized the change in languagelevel in the news during the EM. The Theory behind it was that news are now made in a way that drunk (stupid) "footballpeople" can also understand them.
Will the wording of the Tagesschau news bulletins broadcast during the European Championships be formulated in simpler language?
To answer the question, YouTube videos from the last few months are first scraped and then automatically labeled using readability measurements ála Flesch.
#pip install pandas matplotlib textstat scipy seabornimport pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import textstat
from scipy import stats
import seaborn as sns
import re/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/scipy/__init__.py:146: UserWarning: A NumPy version >=1.17.3 and <1.25.0 is required for this version of SciPy (detected version 1.26.4
warnings.warn(f"A NumPy version >={np_minversion} and <{np_maxversion}"
df = pd.read_csv('data/data.csv')
if 'ID' not in df.columns:
df['ID'] = range(1, len(df) + 1)
df.head()
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| ID | url | path | text | title | date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuYkzRypf8 | audio/1_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 25.06.2024 | 2024-06-25 |
| 1 | 2 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAmyhxJoZFM | audio/2_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 24.06.2024 | 2024-06-24 |
| 2 | 3 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVqitc2vJ0c | audio/3_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 23.06.2024 | 2024-06-23 |
| 3 | 4 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmwe8gXfu1c | audio/4_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 22.06.2024 | 2024-06-22 |
| 4 | 5 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-okNLhbCcHc | audio/5_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 20.06.2024 | 2024-06-20 |
def extract_date(title):
date_pattern = re.compile(r'\b\d{1,2}\.\d{1,2}\.\d{2,4}\b')
match = date_pattern.search(title)
return match.group(0) if match else None
def convert_date(date_str):
for fmt in ('%d.%m.%Y', '%d.%m.%y'):
try:
return pd.to_datetime(date_str, format=fmt)
except ValueError:
continue
return None
df['date'] = df['title'].apply(extract_date)
df['date'] = df['date'].apply(convert_date)
df.head()
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| ID | url | path | text | title | date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuYkzRypf8 | audio/1_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 25.06.2024 | 2024-06-25 |
| 1 | 2 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAmyhxJoZFM | audio/2_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 24.06.2024 | 2024-06-24 |
| 2 | 3 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVqitc2vJ0c | audio/3_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 23.06.2024 | 2024-06-23 |
| 3 | 4 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmwe8gXfu1c | audio/4_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 22.06.2024 | 2024-06-22 |
| 4 | 5 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-okNLhbCcHc | audio/5_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 20.06.2024 | 2024-06-20 |
textstat.set_lang("de")
df['flesch'] = df.apply(lambda row: textstat.flesch_reading_ease(row['text']), axis=1)
df.head()
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| ID | url | path | text | title | date | flesch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuYkzRypf8 | audio/1_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 25.06.2024 | 2024-06-25 | 57.65 |
| 1 | 2 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAmyhxJoZFM | audio/2_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 24.06.2024 | 2024-06-24 | 56.85 |
| 2 | 3 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVqitc2vJ0c | audio/3_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 23.06.2024 | 2024-06-23 | 64.60 |
| 3 | 4 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmwe8gXfu1c | audio/4_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 22.06.2024 | 2024-06-22 | 63.00 |
| 4 | 5 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-okNLhbCcHc | audio/5_tagesschau.mp3 | Hier ist das erste deutsche Fernsehen mit der... | tagesschau 20:00 Uhr, 20.06.2024 | 2024-06-20 | 57.25 |
Die EM startete am 14. Juni.
| Score | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| 90-100 | Very Easy |
| 80-89 | Easy |
| 70-79 | Fairly Easy |
| 60-69 | Standard |
| 50-59 | Fairly Difficult |
| 30-49 | Difficult |
| 0-29 | Very Confusing |
df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'], errors='coerce')
df = df.dropna(subset=['date'])
start_date = pd.to_datetime("2024-06-14")
end_date = pd.to_datetime(max(df['date']))
mean_before_em = df[df['date'] < start_date]['flesch'].mean()
mean_during_em = df[(df['date'] >= start_date) & (df['date'] <= end_date)]['flesch'].mean()
# Plotting
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 5))
plt.scatter(df['date'], df['flesch'], marker='o')
plt.axvspan(start_date, end_date, color='red', alpha=0.3, label='EM')
plt.plot([start_date, end_date], [mean_during_em, mean_during_em], color='darkred', linestyle='-', label='Mean Before EM')
plt.plot([pd.to_datetime(min(df['date'])), start_date], [mean_before_em, mean_before_em], color='navy', linestyle='-', label='Mean Before EM')
plt.ylabel('Flesch Score (the higher the easier)')
plt.title('"Tagesschau" - Flesch Scores over Time')
plt.grid(False)
plt.ylim(0, 100)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.legend()
plt.show()
before_em = df[df['date'] < pd.to_datetime("2024-06-14")]['flesch']
during_em = df[(df['date'] >= pd.to_datetime("2024-06-14")) & (df['date'] <= pd.to_datetime(max(df['date'])))]['flesch']
t_stat, p_value = stats.ttest_ind(before_em, during_em)plt.figure(figsize=(10, 5))
sns.kdeplot(before_em, label='Before EM', color='blue', fill=True)
sns.kdeplot(during_em, label='During EM', color='red', fill=True)
plt.axvline(before_em.mean(), color='blue', linestyle='--', label='Mean Before EM')
plt.axvline(during_em.mean(), color='red', linestyle='--', label='Mean During EM')
plt.annotate(f't-statistic: {t_stat:.2f}\np-value: {p_value:.2e}',
xy=(0.5, 0.8), xycoords='axes fraction', fontsize=12,
bbox=dict(facecolor='white', alpha=0.5))
plt.xlim(0, 100)
plt.xlabel('Flesch Score (the higher the easier)')
plt.ylabel('Density')
plt.title('"Tagesschau" - T-Test of Flesh Scores')
plt.grid(False)
plt.legend()
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()
The densityplot shows that the difference in means probably occurs because of the outliers, wich are also seen in the first plot.
To answer the question definitely we have to wait until a few weeks after the EM and see if the languagelevel goes back to normal lows.
Until then we can conclude the general impression that languagelevel changed is only partly legitimized.