05 Nov 2017
I’ve been continuing to verify participant data with team and help organize
volunteer participants.
In addition I’m further analyzing the result of a study preformed last semester.
It appears that in the prior study, many of the most common words in the transcripts are articles, conjunctive phrases, and pronouns (both personal and not). For example, the top 6 are “the, like, and, that, to, i”. This felt like a fairly typical breakdown of English word frequency, so in order to reduce that noise, the top 100 English words were filtered from the list before generating the results.
This produced results were the top words more apparently aligned with the study. (see. “um, pieces, uumm, sort, ok, think”). However, we still see a lot of hesitation markers, simple verbs, and adjectives that can’t give us cognitive content with out their context. Consequentially we decided to focus first on recognizing top nouns (“pieces, guess, baxter, tool, wheels”), specifically key ones of interest, as they provide a more concrete self-contained semantic content.
As such I’m working to modify the analysis code I had written to filter for nouns and have been researching libraries that may help with that. So far the NLTK module looks promising.
29 Oct 2017
Week Ending 29 October
I got a concussion last weekend. As a result I was unable to get much work
done this week, since I had difficulty concentrating and wasn’t have to focus
on screens.
22 Oct 2017
Over the past week I worked with volunteers to guide them through their
participation in the study, as well working with the team to continue to
facilitate the study.
We also now have transcripts from one a previously preformed study. I have
been working on developing python code to analysis them, so that we can decide
what type of content to look at in this and future studies. In the next week
I plan to improve my code a bit and use it to collect data from all of the
transcripts.
15 Oct 2017
Week Ending 15 October
I’ve continued to help facilitate scheduling volunteers. In addition as a team we have begun to go through the data we have collected and manually verify that it is sound before using it as training data.
I’m still looking for more applications, although I have also downloaded the tools found last time to start getting a feel for what their capabilities are. They have proven tricky to install, so hopefully I will have more information about that in the next couple days.
Note: My computer crashed for a few days last week. It has now been restored and is up and running again. And I hope to make up for that lost time this week.
08 Oct 2017
Week Ending 8 October
I’ve continued to help schedule volunteers, as well has to guide them through
their participation in the study. We introduce them to basic premise of the study
and make sure remind them of their right to remove consent if they wish. Participants
are then shown the FACES software. I show them how the different feature work,
and how to use the various selection menus, and then observe their sketch as the
create it so that I can offer suggestions for how to make it more accurate.