Bridging quantitative and qualitative methods for social sciences using text mining techniques

Organiser: Dr Sophia Ananiadou
(Sophia.Ananiadou@manchester.ac.uk or (0161)3063092),
School of Informatics, University of Manchester and National Centre for Text Mining (http://www.nactem.ac.uk/)

Date and location

28 April 2006, Weston Conference Centre, University of Manchester.

Registration

To register for this workshop please complete the registration form.

Summary

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from different
subject areas (computer scientists, computational linguistics, social
scientists, psychologists, etc) in order to explore how text mining
techniques can revolutionise quantitative and qualitative research
methods in social sciences. New technologies from text mining (e.g.
information extraction, summarisation, question-answering, text
categorisation, sectioning, topic identification, etc.) which go beyond
concordances, frequency counts etc can be used for quantitative and
qualitative content analysis of different data types (e.g. transcripts
of interviews, questionnaire analysis, archives, chatroom files,
weblogs, etc). The semantic analysis of new text types, e.g. weblogs is
important for sociologists and political scientists in inferring social
trends. Reputation and sentiment analysis collects and identifies
people’s opinions, attitudes and sentiments in text. Text mining
techniques also aid metadata creation for qualitative data and
facilitate their sharing.