More analysis of text

26/12/12 07:25 [Wednesday]
A week or two ago I started on a program to analyse text from Hansard (which is the printed - or nowadays text online - record of what is said in Parliament). The Hansard text is easily available and will likely be an educated representation of what has been said - that is it will be relatively error-free. Further the speeches reported are made by educated people speaking a fairly modern English. My interest really is in analysing the language to try to learn from exemplars grammatical rules. This follows my efforts a number of months ago with the Bible, another source of English text which is easily available relatively error-free in computer readable form.
My Hansard program has not yet got very far. It has first to identify extraneous elements introduced, such as column headers, the time of day, subject headings and names of speakers. The first task it performs which is genuinely language related is to report whether the Hansard text (block by block) includes any quote-marks. Even this is not entirely straightforward as an apostrophe is printed the same as a single quote-mark. My guess (and I have not gathered much empirical evidence yet) would be that Hansard does not often include instances of embedded direct speech. Identifying quote-marks is an easy way of finding cases of sentences nested within another sentence, but (I believe) sometimes direct quoting occurs in English (and certainly so in other languages) without the use of quote-marks, one example being where thoughts expressed in language are reported. Sometimes italicisation is used as a near equivalent to quote-marks.
The next step is to separate sentences in each block of text. (These are considerations I went through with my Bible text program, and I might end up with general procedures for analysing blocks of English text from any source.) Briefly I will repeat that a sentence ends with a terminator (full-stop, question-mark or exclamation-mark with the use of ellipses not being a clear case) but occasionally - even setting aside embedded quoted passages - question-marks and exclamation-marks occur within the scope of a single sentence, and full-stops can be used to terminate abbreviations within the scope of a sentence (especially 'hon.' for 'honourable' in Hansard).
My ideas then trend to comparing sentences to see if repeated frameworks can be identified, which might lead to notice of grammatically equivalent words or phrases (in the sense that nouns are grammatically equivalent, and other parts of speech, but that the traditional way of parsing sentences considerably simplifies such equivalences).
I commend all this to readers.
26/12/12 10:08
I am pleased to show this debug output:
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'statement.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'that.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'hon.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'hon.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'all.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'ESA.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'assessment.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'hon.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'moon.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'reform.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'time.'
Word preceding seeming full-stop: 'needs.'
Prog ends OK: 31 lines were read from file

November 2011

I have uploaded my diary for November 2011 to my personal website. In that month I had just been blessed with the reduction in dosage of the Risperdal medication I am on.
http://www.colinbrough.co.uk/November_2011.html

Employment and mental illness

16/12/12 06:15 [Sunday]
Historically Society has 'felt sorry' for people unable to work due to the condition of their body or mind or severely hampered in becoming employed, and provided disabled people with money to live on from a general clubbing-together of others not costing each individual much, and provided them with other help where there is excess capacity (like buses which would run anyway but otherwise empty). In recent years - starting earlier certainly than the present Conservative Government in Britain - what has been more to the fore has been to integrate disabled people into the mainstream which means as part of it not giving them any favours. The idea is that any work they can do they should do, and because there is an inherent unwillingness to employ disabled people, perceived as less likely to be up to the job, this is countered by hopeful legislation to outlaw discrimination.
Mentally ill people when they are mentally ill are not likely to be up to the job because the condition of their mind will cause them to lack motivation or to lack skills of planning and organisation. The theory here is that on medication mentally ill people are no longer mentally ill and the debilitations countering their ability to work are corrected. The truth of the question is that for many, medication only partly rectifies their depression or confusion of mind, and for many there are periods in which they relapse. If someone who is mentally ill relapses every few months or every few years this interferes with their capacity to work and makes them less employable. The employer cannot trust that the employee will be up to the mark at any epoch where there may be a lot of demand and need for him to be up to the mark.
It strikes me then that in cases of mental illness some underlying support behind any employment income which may be achieved is a necessary thing. It isn't only DLA to help pay for aids and assistance to counter the condition of disability, but rather Employment Support to make up for the naturally greater obstacles in the way of getting employed and staying employed.
What I'm saying really is that it isn't stigma that employers are less willing to take on mentally ill employees but the hard-nosed assessment that they are inherently less to be relied on. And assessment of unemployed mentally ill people for support - that is people who have had a diagnosis of mental illness even if they are said now to be recovered - needs to allow for this fact in the way things are.

Twitter diary for November 2012

http://www.colinbrough.co.uk/Twitter2012Nov.html