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Punoxysm comments on An even more modest search engine proposal - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.