Split Speaker and Dialogue in RStudio

Question

I have documents such as :

President Dr. Norbert Lammert: I declare the session open.

I will now give the floor to Bundesminister Alexander Dobrindt.

(Applause of CDU/CSU and delegates of the SPD)

Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure:

Ladies and Gentleman. We will today start the biggest investment in infrastructure that ever existed, with over 270 billion Euro, over 1 000 projects and a clear financing perspective.

(Volker Kauder [CDU/CSU]: Genau!)

(Applause of the CDU/CSU and the SPD)

And when I read those .txt documents I would like to create a second column indicating the speaker name.

So what I tried was to first create a list of all possible names and replace them..

library(qdap)

members <- c("Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure:","President Dr. Norbert Lammert:")
members_r <- c("@Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure:","@President Dr. Norbert Lammert:")

prok <- scan(".txt", what = "character", sep = "\n")
prok <- mgsub(members,members_r,prok)

prok <- as.data.frame(prok)
prok$speaker <- grepl("@[^\\@:]*:",prok$prok, ignore.case = T)

My plan was to then get the name between @ and : via regex if speaker == true and apply it downwards until there is a different name (and remove all applause/shout brackets obviously), but that is also where I am not sure how I could do that.

Answer 1

Here is the approach:

      require (qdap)
      #text is the document text

      # remove round brackets and text b/w ()
      a <- bracketX(text, "round") 

      names <- c("President Dr. Norbert Lammert","Alexander Dobrindt" )
      searchString <- paste(names[1],names[2], sep = ".+")

      # Get string from names[1] till names[2] with the help of searchString
      string <- regmatches(a, regexpr(searchString, a))

      # remove names[2] from string
      string <- gsub(names[2],"",string)

This code can be looped when there are more than 2 names

Answer 2

Here is an approach leaning heavily on dplyr.

First, I added a sentence to your sample text to illustrate why we can't just use a colon to identify speaker names.

sampleText <-
"President Dr. Norbert Lammert: I declare the session open.

I will now give the floor to Bundesminister Alexander Dobrindt.

(Applause of CDU/CSU and delegates of the SPD)

Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure:

Ladies and Gentleman. We will today start the biggest investment in infrastructure that ever existed, with over 270 billion Euro, over 1 000 projects and a clear financing perspective.

(Volker Kauder [CDU/CSU]: Genau!)

(Applause of the CDU/CSU and the SPD)

This sentence right here: it is an example of a problem"

I then split the text to simulate the format that it appears you are reading it in (which also puts each speech in a part of a list).

splitText <- strsplit(sampleText, "\n")

Then, I am pulling out all of the potential speakers (anything that precedes a colon) to

allSpeakers <- lapply(splitText, function(thisText){
  grep(":", thisText, value = TRUE) %>%
    gsub(":.*", "", .) %>%
    gsub("\\(", "", .)
}) %>%
  unlist() %>%
  unique()

Which gives us:

[1] "President Dr. Norbert Lammert"                                        
[2] "Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure"
[3] "Volker Kauder [CDU/CSU]"                                              
[4] "This sentence right here" 

Obviously, the last one is not a legitimate name, so should be excluded from our list of speakers:

legitSpeakers <-
  allSpeakers[-4]

Now, we are ready to work through the speech. I have included stepwise comments below, instead of describing in text here

speechText <- lapply(splitText, function(thisText){

  # Remove applause and interjections (things in parentheses)
  # along with any blank lines; though you could leave blanks if you want
  cleanText <-
    grep("(^\\(.*\\)$)|(^$)", thisText
         , value = TRUE, invert = TRUE)

  # Split each line by a semicolor
  strsplit(cleanText, ":") %>%
    lapply(function(x){
      # Check if the first element is a legit speaker
      if(x[1] %in% legitSpeakers){
        # If so, set the speaker, and put the statement in a separate portion
        # taking care to re-collapse any breaks caused by additional colons
        out <- data.frame(speaker = x[1]
                          , text = paste(x[-1], collapse = ":"))
      } else{
        # If not a legit speaker, set speaker to NA and reset text as above
        out <- data.frame(speaker = NA
                          , text = paste(x, collapse = ":"))
      }
      # Return whichever version we made above
      return(out)
    }) %>%
    # Bind all of the rows together
    bind_rows %>%
    # Identify clusters of speech that go with a single speaker
    mutate(speakingGroup = cumsum(!is.na(speaker))) %>%
    # Group by those clusters
    group_by(speakingGroup) %>%
    # Collapse that speaking down into a single row
    summarise(speaker = speaker[1]
              , fullText = paste(text, collapse = "\n"))
})

This yields

[[1]]

speakingGroup  speaker                                                                fullText                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

            1  President Dr. Norbert Lammert                                          I declare the session open.\nI will now give the floor to Bundesminister Alexander Dobrindt.                                                                                                                                                     
            2  Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure  Ladies and Gentleman. We will today start the biggest investment in infrastructure that ever existed, with over 270 billion Euro, over 1 000 projects and a clear financing perspective.\nThis sentence right here: it is an example of a problem

If you prefer to have each line of text separately, replace the summarise at the end with mutate(speaker = speaker[1]) and you will get one line for each line of the speech, like this:

speaker                                                                text                                                                                                                                                                                      speakingGroup
President Dr. Norbert Lammert                                          I declare the session open.                                                                                                                                                                           1
President Dr. Norbert Lammert                                          I will now give the floor to Bundesminister Alexander Dobrindt.                                                                                                                                       1
Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure                                                                                                                                                                                                        2
Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure  Ladies and Gentleman. We will today start the biggest investment in infrastructure that ever existed, with over 270 billion Euro, over 1 000 projects and a clear financing perspective.              2
Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure  This sentence right here: it is an example of a problem                                                                                                                                               2

Answer 3

This seems to work

library(qdap)

members <- c("Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure:","President Dr. Norbert Lammert:")
members_r <- c("@Alexander Dobrindt, Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure:","@President Dr. Norbert Lammert:")

testprok <- read.table("txt",header=FALSE,quote = "\"",comment.char="",sep="\t")

testprok$V1 <- mgsub(members,members_r,testprok$V1)

testprok$V2 <- ifelse(grepl("@[^\\@:]*:",testprok$V1),testprok$V1,NA)       

####function from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7735647/replacing-nas-with-latest-non-na-value         
repeat.before = function(x) {   # repeats the last non NA value. Keeps leading NA
  ind = which(!is.na(x))      # get positions of nonmissing values
  if(is.na(x[1]))             # if it begins with a missing, add the 
    ind = c(1,ind)        # first position to the indices
  rep(x[ind], times = diff(   # repeat the values at these indices
    c(ind, length(x) + 1) )) # diffing the indices + length yields how often 
}                               # they need to be repeated

testprok$V2 = repeat.before(testprok$V2)