Tracking Amendments to Legislation and Other Political Texts with a Novel Minimum-Edit-Distance Algorithm: DocuToads.
(a) Identical text sequences
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The most common source of disagreement in our sample of articles can be traced primarily to the addition of new articles. In such cases, new text was added between two previously existing articles in the reference document. DocuToads, however, has to record the additions at an index position in the reference text which will correspond to either the preceding or following article. There is in other words a random component which may cause DocuToads to disagree with human coders who can implement any single rule on the placement of new articles. This constitutes a form of negative serial correlation, a common concern found in time-series analysis. Users of DocuToads are advised to consider this issue if correlating article-level results with other article-level variables assigned by human coders. This source of disagreement has no effect on the document-level results.