Firm digests debate data

PROVO — Some 53 million Americans watched this year's presidential debates. The talking heads on various news channels analyzed them for days. But the employees of a Provo company had a more demanding task: to chew them up and spit them out — in data form.

The company, Hamilton-Locke, uses a program developed by Brigham Young University to analyze texts in several different fields, among them forensics, intelligence, market research and politics. Prior to this election season, Hamilton-Locke contacted The Associated Press to offer their services to analyze the debates.

"We probably looked at 20 different variables, and we did it in about two hours after the speeches were given, and had that data ready," said Hamilton-Locke President David Neubert. "For instance, we focus on elements like who's using more exact speech, who uses more optimistic speech, who uses more pessimistic speech, what percentage of their speech focuses on what area."

The Associated Press published certain findings of the company's analysis, but not all.

"We actually have 110 different language classifiers, like vagueness and hedging," Neubert said. "They're all relative, in some sense. The main criteria that they were looking for were things that were easily explainable in a graphic."

The analysis was completed using a WordCruncher, a program developed at BYU over the past 20 years. The program was the brainchild of Monte Shelley, who brought the idea to James Rosenvall. Together with their team, they have released seven versions of the program.

"It started out as a really simple thing, and then as we started working on it, it became obvious that there were other things that you could do," Rosenvall said.

The program began as a tool to aid people writing lessons for manuals of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"It was a tool to help them find scriptures and things and it was intentionally designed for a very narrow focus," Rosenvall said. "It's being used now with literary materials, political kinds of things, scriptural data — all the way from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the LDS church scriptures all being used with the same software."

BYU owns the license to the program, but in 1994 Hamilton-Locke gained exclusive rights to market the program. In addition to The Associated Press, Hamilton-Locke has worked with organizations like Cisco Systems and the FBI to analyze written statements.

"It's a tool that can be used in law, market research, intelligence analysis; it can be used on Arabic documents, Chinese documents, Korean documents to analyze for authorship and subject matter, and other things," Neubert said.