Special Material in Samples

Sometimes, material within a sample needs to be treated specially. There are currently two such special situations: (a) material which should be ignored, and (b) material which provides "hints" to the scoring system.

(a) Material to ignore. The original sample collection protocol was built around uninterrupted verbal samples with a target length of about five minutes. Since those early days, the Scales have been used with a variety of collection techniques, including interviews, dialogs, and group discussions. Scoring the utterances of a single speaker from a literal transcription of such multiple-speaker activities can be difficult, because the non-relevant material must be deleted or otherwise ignored. To make these types of investigations easier, the computerized system permits portions of samples to be marked as "invisible." The material is then read and copied to any scoring log without being scored.

To have the system ignore material within a sample, enclose the material to be ignored within braces ({}). For example, I don't know what to say. {Tell me about some interesting experience you have had.} Well, I went hang-gliding once.

In this example, the first and third sentences would be scored, and the second would be ignored.

The capability to flag material as "invisible" to scoring also provides a means for investigators to place notes or comments into transcripts to draw attention to specific clauses or areas of the sample, or to record relevant non-verbal information that needs to be correlated with the verbal sample.

(b) Hints to the system. Some scoring categories are extremely difficult to automate. For example, determining that an utterance is "bizarre" or "nonsensical" (as required by the IIIA subscale of the Social Alienation/Personal Disorganization scale) is beyond the capabilities of the automated system. People, however, are generally good at making such determinations, even if they have not been formally trained as scorers. To exploit this role reversal, the system understands a limited set of annotations in samples and will translate those annotations directly into scores that it is unlikely to assign on its own.

All scoring "hints" are enclosed in square brackets ([]). Currently, scoring hints are used only on the Social Alienation-Personal Disorganization (SAPD) and Cognitive Impairment (CogImp) scales. The currently recognized hints and their assigned scores are:

Case is not significant in hints. Additional text may appear within the square brackets, following the hint word. For example, [missing 4 words].