Extract quotes by Obama: sometimes somewhat difficult, depending on article structure. In Obama’s case, simply due to the volume of his speeches, it would be easy to extract a large high-confidence (but incomplete) corpus.
Find sentences within 2 words of references to Alinsky. Alternately, use plagiarism-detecting software to detect near-quotes (not plagiarized necessarily; this is a known application of such software) of Alinsky in Obama’s speeches.
Apply known sentiment analysis techniques; probably insufficient due to the way political speech, compared to restaurant and product reviews, is structured.
Use a human to take as many of the top candidate quotes as possible and manually look over them. Still a lot easier than looking over the whole set of Obama related speeches and articles.
So this is easily done, just not easily done at scale with a couple specific barriers. Quote attribution and summarizing context of a quote, allusion or reference are probably the two biggest technical barriers.
But I’m really interested in resources so easy as to seduce the blogger to whom all of that would be Greek.
I am interested, and would like to find others who are interested, in finding modest ways to make the electorate more rational, which I think is really in our best interest—not just to make ourselves super-rational Bayesian black belts and all that, as valid a pursuit as that is.
I think just a really excellent searchable quotebank for politicians, eventually with some degree of easy cross-referencing or easy “find similar quotes” would be the place to start.
But how much that really elevates discourse is debatable.
Take articles mentioning Obama and Alinsky
Extract quotes by Obama: sometimes somewhat difficult, depending on article structure. In Obama’s case, simply due to the volume of his speeches, it would be easy to extract a large high-confidence (but incomplete) corpus.
Find sentences within 2 words of references to Alinsky. Alternately, use plagiarism-detecting software to detect near-quotes (not plagiarized necessarily; this is a known application of such software) of Alinsky in Obama’s speeches.
Apply known sentiment analysis techniques; probably insufficient due to the way political speech, compared to restaurant and product reviews, is structured.
Use a human to take as many of the top candidate quotes as possible and manually look over them. Still a lot easier than looking over the whole set of Obama related speeches and articles.
So this is easily done, just not easily done at scale with a couple specific barriers. Quote attribution and summarizing context of a quote, allusion or reference are probably the two biggest technical barriers.
I do appreciate that.
But I’m really interested in resources so easy as to seduce the blogger to whom all of that would be Greek.
I am interested, and would like to find others who are interested, in finding modest ways to make the electorate more rational, which I think is really in our best interest—not just to make ourselves super-rational Bayesian black belts and all that, as valid a pursuit as that is.
I think just a really excellent searchable quotebank for politicians, eventually with some degree of easy cross-referencing or easy “find similar quotes” would be the place to start.
But how much that really elevates discourse is debatable.