Debate recap for those who only want the Cliff-notes

If you don’t watch the candidate debates, you may not understand what’s going on in the presidential race. Politilines, by Periscopic, lets you see what the candidates talked about each night.

The left column lists top issues, the middle shows words used, and the right column shows candidates. Roll over any word or name to see who talked about what or what was talked about by whom.

Here’s how they do it:

We collected transcripts from the American Presidency Project at UCSB, categorized them by hand, then ranked lemmatized word-phrases (or n-grams) by their frequency of use. Word-phrases can be made of up to five words. Our ranking agorithm accounts for things such as exclusive word-phrases – meaning, it won’t count “United States” twice if it’s used in a higher n-gram such as “President of the United States.”

See interactive version.

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