Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists: Prediction and Classification

Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists: Prediction and Classification
ISBN-10
1108963099
ISBN-13
9781108963091
Category
Political Science
Language
English
Published
2022-03-31
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Author
Dirk Hovy

Description

Text contains a wealth of information about about a wide variety of sociocultural constructs. Automated prediction methods can infer these quantities (sentiment analysis is probably the most well-known application). However, there is virtually no limit to the kinds of things we can predict from text: power, trust, misogyny, are all signaled in language. These algorithms easily scale to corpus sizes infeasible for manual analysis. Prediction algorithms have become steadily more powerful, especially with the advent of neural network methods. However, applying these techniques usually requires profound programming knowledge and machine learning expertise. As a result, many social scientists do not apply them. This Element provides the working social scientist with an overview of the most common methods for text classification, an intuition of their applicability, and Python code to execute them. It covers both the ethical foundations of such work as well as the emerging potential of neural network methods.

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