Lately we've seen some posts hereabouts that various of us have called word salad. Perhaps a clinical psychologist would be a little slower than a layman to use the term, but I think he'd eventually characterize the posts I'm thinking of in that way.
Text in the form of "an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them" (I'm quoting the Wiki article) makes irritating reading, as we all know, and it's a waste of time to try to find paraphrasible meaning in it -- and equally a waste of time to challenge the poor soul who typed it to paraphrase it, or to define the terms used. At first we ridicule, then we pity, finally we ignore.
But I wonder: Would it be possible to use textual analysis to tease some significance out of word salad? Simple word counts might be a way to start, to the extent that the inventory of words the sufferer uses might reveal something about his obsessions and confusions. Perhaps more sophisticated tools for analyzing sentences would uncover repeated linkages of terms (you can't call them ideas; or can you?) that could give a therapist a glimpse, a hint, that he could use to get inside these undoubtedly tormented minds, and possibly start to help them.
Have clinicians ever tried, say, working with Natural Language Toolkit on a salad text?
Text in the form of "an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them" (I'm quoting the Wiki article) makes irritating reading, as we all know, and it's a waste of time to try to find paraphrasible meaning in it -- and equally a waste of time to challenge the poor soul who typed it to paraphrase it, or to define the terms used. At first we ridicule, then we pity, finally we ignore.
But I wonder: Would it be possible to use textual analysis to tease some significance out of word salad? Simple word counts might be a way to start, to the extent that the inventory of words the sufferer uses might reveal something about his obsessions and confusions. Perhaps more sophisticated tools for analyzing sentences would uncover repeated linkages of terms (you can't call them ideas; or can you?) that could give a therapist a glimpse, a hint, that he could use to get inside these undoubtedly tormented minds, and possibly start to help them.
Have clinicians ever tried, say, working with Natural Language Toolkit on a salad text?
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