Doris: A Tool for Interactive Exploration of Historic Corpora

Insights into social phenomenon can be gleaned from trends and patterns in corpora of documents associated with that phenomenon. Recent years have witnessed the use of computational techniques, mostly based on keywords, to analyze large corpora for these purposes. In this paper, we extend these techniques to incorporate semantic features. We introduce Doris, an interactive exploration tool that combines semantic features with information retrieval techniques to enable exploration of document corpora corresponding to the social phenomenon. We discuss the semantic techniques and describe an implementation on a corpus of United States (US) presidential speeches. We illustrate, with examples, how the ability to combine syntactic and semantic features in a visualization helps researchers gain insights into the underlying phenomenon.