Terms of use

What DebateLens is

DebateLens is a research workspace for the analysis of televised political debate. It is offered for scholarly use. It is not a news service, a fact-checking service, or an electoral forecasting service.

Material you upload

You confirm that you hold the rights necessary to upload, store and analyse any recording, audio file or transcript you place in the system, and that doing so does not breach a broadcaster's or archive's terms.

You remain the author of your own coded observations, interpretations and reports.

The status of automated output

Transcription, segmentation and coding produced by the system are drafts. They are labelled as drafts and are excluded from every computed figure until a researcher accepts or qualifies them.

The comparative interpretation tallies, element by element, which participant's discourse is denser in the framework evidence counted for this corpus, and states which participant holds the stronger observed profile — the analytical upper hand — in this recording. It is not a statement of who won the debate, a ranking of candidates, or a prediction of an election.

Ownership of the framework

The Sharoufi Multimodal Debate Analysis Framework (version 1.0), together with its domains, categories, operational definitions, repetition typology, gaze partition, Lexical Cohesive Trio and codebook, is the intellectual property of Dr. Hussain Al Sharoufi. It was developed and applied manually between 1997–2001 and is set out in the doctoral thesis "Pragmatic and Paralinguistic Features of Televised Political Discourse in a Political Debate".

Using the platform grants you the right to analyse your own material and to publish your own findings. It does not transfer any right in the framework, the codebook, the coding instructions or the software.

Copyright & licensing

Copyright in the framework subsists automatically and is asserted here expressly: © Dr. Hussain Al Sharoufi, 1997–2001 and continuing. All rights reserved.

Dated, third-party proof of authorship exists independently of this site: the doctoral thesis "Pragmatic and Paralinguistic Features of Televised Political Discourse in a Political Debate" (2001) was completed at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, under the supervision of Prof. Adrian Nicolescu, and is deposited at the National Library of Romania, Bucharest — call number V 47274. The framework's later development is documented in peer-reviewed publications from 2013 onward, listed on the Citation & provenance page.

Reports, tables, datasets and figures you export remain yours to publish, provided the automatic attribution line is kept intact and the framework is cited. You may quote and teach from the framework with attribution; you may not re-badge it, redistribute the codebook as your own, build it into a commercial product, or use the platform's content as training data without written permission.

Mandatory citation

Any research output, publication, thesis, report, presentation or public analysis that relies on DebateLens must cite the framework and its author using one of the citations published on the Citation and provenance page. Exported tables, datasets, figures and reports carry this attribution automatically; it must not be removed or altered.

Prohibited use of the framework

You may not re-badge the framework or the codebook under another name, redistribute them as another party's scheme, or incorporate them into a commercial product or service without written permission.

You may not use the platform, its pages, its prompts or its stored analyses as training data, and you may not scrape, crawl or bulk-extract them by automated means.

Reverse engineering the coding instructions in order to reproduce the framework outside this platform is not permitted.

The DebateLens platform itself — its software, analysis engine, report formats and user interface — is likewise protected. No part of this application may be reproduced, cloned, re-implemented, replicated or offered as a competing product, in whole or in part, by any person or automated agent, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder.

Acceptable use

Do not use DebateLens to harass a person, to fabricate evidence, or to present machine drafts as reviewed findings. Do not attempt to reach material belonging to another account.

Availability and limits

The service is provided without warranty of uninterrupted availability. Long analyses can be interrupted and resumed. Keep your own copies of any material you cannot replace.