Tag: NLP

Wordle with NLP for Data Scientists

I have played my fair share of Wordle.

I’m not necessarily good at it, but most days I get to solve the puzzle.

The experience is completely different with Semantle — a Wordle-inspired puzzle in which you also need to guess the word of the day.

Unlike in Wordle, Semantle gives you unlimited guesses though. And, boy, you will need many!

Like Wordle, Semantle gives you hints as to how close your guesses were to the secret word of the day.

However, where Wordle shows you how good your guesses were in terms of the letters used, Semantle evaluates the semantic similarity of your guesses to the secret word. For the 1000 most similar words to the secret word, it will show you its closeness like in the picture above.

This semantic similarity comes from the domain of Natural Language Processing — NLP — and this basically reflects how often words are used in similar contexts in natural language.

For instance, the words “love” and “hate” may seem like opposites, but they will often score similarly in grammatical sentences. According to the semantle FAQ the actual opposite of “love” is probably something like “Arizona Diamondbacks”, or “carburetor”.

Another example is last day’s solution (15 March 2022), when the secret word was circle. The ten closest words you could have guessed include circles and semicircle, but more distinctive words such as corner and clockwise.

Further downfield you could have guessed relatively close words like saucer, dot, parabola, but I would not have expected words like outwaited, weaved, and zipped.

The creator of Semantle scored the semantic similarity for almost all words used in the English language, by training a so-called word2vec model based on a very large dataset of news articles (GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin from late 2021).

Now, every day, one word is randomly selected as the secret word, and you can try to guess which one it is. I usually give up after 300 to 400 guesses, but my record was 76 guesses for uncovering the secret word world.

Try it out yourself: https://semantle.novalis.org/

And do share your epic wins and fails!

Analysis of Media Coverage on Refugees

Hannah Yan Han is doing #100dayprojects on data science and visual storytelling and I can only recommend that you take a look yourself. Below you find her R text analysis (#41) of UNHCR speeches and TV coverage on refugees.

Unsurprisingly, nouns like asylum, repatriation, displacement, persecution, plight, and crisis appear significantly more often in UNHCR speeches on refugees than in general English texts. The first visualization below shows the action-oriented verbs most commonly used in combination with these nouns.

This second visualization shows the most occurring verb-noun pairs.

Hannah used newsflash to retrieve the GDELT data on US TV news. Some channels seem to cover refugees more than others. I would have loved to see which topics occurred on each channel, but unfortunately she did not report on this.

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.