Tag: education

TACIT: An open-source Text Analysis, Crawling, and Interpretation Tool

Click here for the original PDF: TACIT 2017

The first programs for (scientific) text mining are already over 50 years old. More recent efforts, such as the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC; Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010), have greatly improved our text analytical capabilities. Moreover, several single-purpose programs have been developed, which also consider syntactic text structures (e.g., Syntactic Complexity Analyzer [Lu, 2010], TAALES [Kyle & Crossley, 2015]).However, the widespread use of many of these programs has been hampered by two major barriers.

First, considerable technical expertise is required, which obstructs researchers without statistical backgrounds. For example, packages such as tm in R (Meyer et al., 2015) have been developed to conduct natural-language processing, but the steep learning curve forms a challenge. Additionally, the constant increase of computational processing power and the proliferation of new algorithms makes it difficult for researchers to maintain working knowledge of state-of-the-art methods.

Alternatively, most of the existing user-friendly NLP programs (and packages), such as RapidMiner (Akthar & Hahne, 2012), SAS Text Miner (Abell, 2014), or SPSS Modeler (IBM Corp., 2011), charge either a large software fee up front or a subscription fee. The cost of these programs can be prohibitively expensive for junior researchers and researchers looking to integrate new techniques into their research toolbox.

In the attached article, TACIT is introduced: Text Analysis, Crawling and Investigation Tool. TACIT is an open-source architecture that establishes a pipeline between the various stages of text-based research by integrating tools for text mining, data cleaning, and analysis under a single user-friendly architecture. In addition to being prepackaged with a range of easily applied, cutting-edge methods, TACIT’s design also allows other researchers to write their own plugins.

The authors’ hope is that TACIT can facilitate the integration and use of advancements in computational linguistics in psychological research, and by doing so can help researchers make use of the ever-growing documents of our social discourse in ways that have previously not been possible.

Statistics Visually Explained

Statistical literacy is essential to our data-driven society. Analytics has been and continues to be a game changer in many business fields, among other Human Resources. Yet, for all the increased importance and demand for statistical competence, the pedagogical approaches in statistics have barely changed.

Seeing Theory is a project designed and created by Daniel Kunin with support from Brown University’s Royce Fellowship Program. The goal of the project is to make statistics more accessible to a wider range of students through interactive visualizations.

Using JavaScript, the researchers have made statistics both intuitive and beautiful at the same time.

seeing theory

Veritasium: Bayes’ Theorem explained

Veritasium makes educational video’s, mostly about science, and recently they recorded one offering an intuitive explanation of Bayes’ Theorem. They guide the viewer through Bayes’ thought process coming up with the theory, explain its workings, but also acknowledge some of the issues when applying Bayesian statistics in society.

“The thing we forget in Bayes’ Theorem is that our actions play a role in determining outcomes, in determining how true things actually are.” 8.23

“A really good understanding of Bayes’ Theorem implies that experimentation is essential: if you’ve been doing the same thing for a long time and getting the same result – that you’re not necessarily happy with – maybe it’s time to change.” 8.48

The video, see below, lasts around 9 minutes.