Feature Alignment for the Analysis of Verbatim Text Transcripts

Abstract

In the research of deliberative democracy, political scientists are interested in analyzing the communication models of discussions, debates, and mediation processes with the goal of extracting reoccurring discourse patterns from the verbatim transcripts of these conversations. To enhance the time-exhaustive manual analysis of such patterns, we introduce a visual analytics approach that enables the exploration and analysis of repetitive feature patterns over parallel text corpora using feature alignment. Our approach is tailored to the requirements of our domain experts. In this paper, we discuss our visual design and workflow, and we showcase the applicability of our approach using an experimental parallel corpus of political debates.