dc_backchannel: Extract Backchannel Discourse Connectors in Context
In trinker/discon: Discourse Connectors Analysis

Description Usage Arguments Details Value References See Also Examples

Extract backchannel discourse connectors in context.

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dc_backchannel(text.var, grouping.var, n.before = 1, tot = FALSE,
  n.after = n.before, ord.inds = TRUE, markup = c("<<", ">>"),
  name = "backchannel", ...)

`text.var`	The text variable.
`grouping.var`	The grouping variables. Also takes a single grouping variable or a list of 1 or more grouping variables.
`n.before`	The number of rows before the indexed occurrence.
`tot`	logical. If `TRUE` condenses sub-units (e.g., sentences) into turns of talk for that `grouping.var`.
`n.after`	The number of rows after the indexed occurrence.
`ord.inds`	logical. If `TRUE` inds is ordered least to greatest.
`markup`	A character vector of length two indicating the left (element 1) and right (element 2) boundary markers to use to highlight the backchannel discourse connectors. Use `c("", "")` to not mark the backchannel discourse markers.
`name`	A string indicating the name to search for within the internal data sets, typically the function's name. Generally, for internal use.
`...`	Other arguments passed to `termco`.

Backchannels are typically a listener indicating that they are listening and yielding the floor to the speaker. Such utterances are rarely less than a few words.

An internal function checks that a line contains a maximum of three words to be considered. This can be changed by supplying an argument to max via control. For example to set the number of words to 5, use: control = list(max = 2)). Additionally, a second internal function ensures that the speaker's turn is at max one row (1 sentence if sentSplit has been used).

Returns returns a list of 2:

`counts`	A `termco` object of backchannel discourse marker counts.
`backchannel`	A `trans_context` object of backchannel discourse connectors in context.

Ward, N. (2000, October). Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts. Proceedings of the 1st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (pp. 29-35). Hong Kong: Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W00-1004

Linguistic Data Consortium. (2004) Simple metadata annotation specification (MDE). University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/rt/2004-fall/docs/SimpleMDE_V6.2-draft.pdf

termco, trans_context

out <- with(pres_debates2012[1:2000, ], dc_backchannel(dialogue, person))
out[1]
out[2]
plot(out)

## Save externally use .doc or .txt
## print(out[[2]], file="backchannel.doc")