Quantitative language analysis and visualisation in R

Topic: Quantitative language analysis and visualisation in R

When: 17 December 12.00 to 13.00

Where: Online

Speaker: Veerle Eijsbroek, PhD student at the Department of Psychology of Lund University, Sweden  

Spoken language: English

Abstract

Advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) have enabled psychology researchers to quantitatively study psychological states and behaviors through language. These advancements have laid the foundation for language-based assessments, which can be used to measure, understand, and describe psychological states and behaviors based on natural language. Language can also be visualized to support the interpretation of quantitative assessment scores, reveal meaningful patterns, and clarify how language use relates to psychological states or behaviors. These visualization techniques can range from simple correlations between individual words to more advanced AI-based methods, including Large Language Models and topic modeling. The goal of the open-source R packages text and topics is to make these techniques accessible to social and behavioural scientists, enabling them to use quantitative language analyses and visualisations for meaningful, data-driven insights.