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Purpose Analysis widget

Introduction

The Purpose Analysis widget can be used for finding the purpose in sentences in text. This corresponds with the concept with the same name in Burke’s dramatistic pentad and with final clause in linguistics. Here are two example sentences:

English: John walks every day. Thus he improves his health
Dutch: Jan wandelt elke dag. Daardoor verbetert hij zijn gezondheid

In the English sentence, the purpose phrase is it is good for his health. The sentence also contains an intentionally performed action as context: John walks 30 minutes everyday. The action is linked to the purpose phrase by an adverb (because). The purpose phrase is called PURPOSE in the widget, the action phrase CONTEXT while the conjunction is named ADVERB.

Methods

The identification of purpose phrases in text requires a tool which can recognize intention. As far as we know, no such tool exists. Instead, we use an approximation based on the syntactic analysis tool Spacy. The Purpose Analysis widget offers two strategies for finding purpose phrases:

  1. verbs: search for verbs like want to identify the purpose of the author of the text

  2. adverbs: search for adverbs like because to find cause-effect relations in the text which could be context-purpose relations

None of these strategies work perfectly. The Purpose Analysis widget offers the users to provide lists of verbs and adverbs, and then select the strategy which corresponds best with their application.

Languages

The Purpose Analysis widget has been tested for Dutch. The verb file and adverb file need to be chosen separately from the language selection. Languages other than Dutch and English are not supported.

Relations with other widgets

The Purpose Analysis widget expects input from the Elements widget. The output table can be inspected in a Data Table widget.

Screenshots

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Figure 1: The Purpose Analysis widget expects input from the Elements widget. The output table can be inspected in a Data Table widget

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Figure 2: Purpose Analysis widget analysis of the sentence: “Jan wandelt elke dag. Daardoor verbetert hij zijn gezondheid”. The Browse button can be used to select a different abverbs file

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Figure 3: Contents of the file dutch_purpose_adverbs.csv

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Figure 4: Output table of the Means Analysis widget for the sentence “Jan wandelt elke dag. Daardoor verbetert hij zijn gezondheid”