Stories and social networks - Narrative Intelligence - page 312

algorithm similar to the one in (Grefenstette 1994) is used. Nouns that are
used or discussed in the same manner are calculated to be similar and are
placed close to one another in the semantic networks. One can understand
this semantic network as a crude approximation to the sorts of metaphors
of discourse identified by linguists like George Lakoff (Lakoff & Johnson
1980). Thus, for example, if the noun “economy” and the noun “plant” are
often associated with the same verbs and adjectives (e.g., “plants grow”, the
economy grows”, “plants have roots”, “the economy has roots”, “we have
a healthy economy”, “we have a healthy plant” etc.) the two words will be
closely coupled in the word associations network and one can read that
network as stating something like “the economy is like a plant.”
Three parts of the fourfold output of the system (social networks, themes, and
semantic networks) correspond to the three metafunctions of language defined
by the linguist Michael Halliday (Halliday 1994): the interpersonal (language
connects people together), the textual (language connects itself together by ref-
erencing other pieces of language through practices like quotation), and the
ideational (language contains or carries ideas in it that are associated with
other ideas). The vast amount of research that has been done in sociolinguistics
within a Hallidayean framework illustrates ways in which the current system
couldbeimprovedif-forthekindsofworksociolinguistshavebeendoing
by hand - analogous computational linguistic techniques can be developed. A
Hallidayean framework is also being applied by other researchers working on
similar corpora, but with simpler computational text analysis procedures; see,
for example, (Yates 1996).
A user's manual for the Conversation Map system and interfaces for several
archives can be found on the web at this address: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/
∼ sack/CM/. With the Conversation Map interface, the interested reader can ex-
plore example messages, social and semantic networks, and themes like those
discussed in the following section.
Message archives
Two message archives will be discussed. Both archives contain messages posted
to the Usenet newsgroup alt.tv.x-files, a group devoted to discussion of the in-
ternationally broadcast television show entitled The X-files . The Usenet news-
group discussion is archived and publicly available at a variety of websites in-