The immediate political-analytic application of lexical classification is semantic content analysis. The tools presented above open a universe of ways to analyze texts, leaving behind many problems of traditional computerized content analysis, but bringing some new ones. This section anticipates some evaluational issues for the methodology. Traditional content analysis has already faced the issues of reliability and validity. It evaluates results by considering the reliability of a model and the validity of the components of the model.
Stability refers to the temporal stability of preparing text for machine parsing.
When the same coder prepares input text at different times, the resulting text model may reflect several different coding practices within the processing model. Stability should encompass classificational stability , or the effects on classification of variations in coding practices. Instability can arise as coders make texts literal and explicit. Allowing multiple word senses within part of speech reduces the changes to the text, and therefore, should enhance stability. Although stability measures the consistency of private understandings, intercoder reliability, or reproducibility, measures the similarities and differences between different coders.