Enriching the Social Sciences Through Text Mining Alan Maloney, Senior Product Analyst, Sage Publications

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Enriching the
Social Sciences
through Text
Mining

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1,400,000 journal articles 366,000 numerical data series
100,000 book chapters 4,000 reports
1,300 case studies 12 debate series
112,000 reference entries 1,300 videos
400 literature reviews 1,000 podcasts

4. The two sides of text mining
Internal: content enrichment
• Auto-tagging
• Links to related material
External: enabling users to
mine our content

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Case study: SAGE Knowledge
• Problem:
• Almost 4,000 books and encyclopedias, hardly any of
which have keywords
• Even fewer have keywords at chapter level
• No links to other relevant content on other SAGE sites
• Possible solutions:
• Get someone to read it all
• Get someone to not read it all
• Get the authors to do it
• Get a computer to do it

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Case study: SAGE Knowledge
• Problem:
• Almost 4,000 books and encyclopedias, hardly any of
which have keywords
• Even fewer have keywords at chapter level
• Possible solutions:
• Get someone to read it all
• Get someone to not read it all
• Get the authors to do it
• Get a computer to do it

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Case study: SAGE Knowledge
● New problem:
• Lack of a standard vocabulary to describe social science
concepts
● Possible solutions:
• Pay someone to make one
• Find/license one
• Build one

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Forming a common vocabulary
How do we identify
the most important
concepts in our
content?

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Improving recall and
disambiguation

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Improving recall and
disambiguation

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Sochi Hosts the 2014 Winter Olympic Games: February 4 and 7, 2014. In
February 2014, the coastal resort city of Sochi, Russia, played host to the 22nd
Winter Olympic Games. It was the first Olympics held in Russia since the Soviet
Union dissolved in 1991, and the country—along with Russian president Vladimir
Putin—was heavily invested in the games’ success, hoping to impress the rest of
the world. In the years and months preceding the games, political developments,
security concerns, and allegations of corruption drew harsh scrutiny from
outside Russia and increased speculation that the games could be a disaster.
Internal Turmoil. Perhaps chief among the concerns surrounding Russia's
Olympics was ensuring the security of those attending the games. Sochi is
located in a part of Russia that is close to the country's North Caucasus, which
encompasses several regions with peoples who are seeking independence from
Russia.

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Sochi Hosts the 2014 Winter Olympic Games: February 4 and 7, 2014.
In February 2014, the coastal resort city of Sochi, Russia, played host to the 22nd
Winter Olympic Games.
It was the first Olympics held in Russia since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991,
and the country—along with Russian president Vladimir Putin—was heavily
invested in the games’ success, hoping to impress the rest of the world.
In the years and months preceding the games, political developments, security
concerns, and allegations of corruption drew harsh scrutiny from outside Russia
and increased speculation that the games could be a disaster.
Internal Turmoil.
Perhaps chief among the concerns surrounding Russia's Olympics was ensuring
the security of those attending the games.
Sochi is located in a part of Russia that is close to the country's North Caucasus,
which encompasses several regions with peoples who are seeking independence
from Russia.

20. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC
Sochi Hosts the 2014 Winter Olympic Games: February 4 and 7, 2014.
In February 2014, the coastal resort city of Sochi, Russia, played host to the 22nd
Winter Olympic Games.
It was the first Olympics held in Russia since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991,
and the country—along with Russian president Vladimir Putin—was heavily
invested in the games’ success, hoping to impress the rest of the world.
In the years and months preceding the games, political developments, security
concerns, and allegations of corruption drew harsh scrutiny from outside Russia
and increased speculation that the games could be a disaster.
Internal Turmoil.
Perhaps chief among the concerns surrounding Russia's Olympics was ensuring
the security of those attending the games.
Sochi is located in a part of Russia that is close to the country's North Caucasus,
which encompasses several regions with peoples who are seeking independence
from Russia.

21. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC
Sochi Hosts the 2014 Winter Olympic Games: February 4 and 7, 2014.
In February 2014, the coastal resort city of Sochi, Russia, played host to the 22nd
Winter Olympic Games.
It was the first Olympics held in Russia since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991,
and the country—along with Russian president Vladimir Putin—was heavily
invested in the games’ success, hoping to impress the rest of the world.
In the years and months preceding the games, political developments, security
concerns, and allegations of corruption drew harsh scrutiny from outside Russia
and increased speculation that the games could be a disaster.
Internal Turmoil.
Perhaps chief among the concerns surrounding Russia's Olympics was ensuring
the security of those attending the games.
Sochi is located in a part of Russia that is close to the country's North Caucasus,
which encompasses several regions with peoples who are seeking independence
from Russia.

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Sochi 0.130
IOC 0.079
athlete 0.068
Olympics 0.058
Olympic Games 0.057
Putin 0.044
International Olympic Committee 0.029
IOC president 0.027
Olympic project 0.027
Olympic athlete 0.026

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Olympic Games 1.808
games 1.062
Russia 0.772
athletes 0.642
Vladimir Putin 0.511
sport 0.411
skiing 0.305
homosexuality 0.300
Black Sea 0.291
committees 0.277

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False friends
• Acceleration is a meaningful term in engineering, but not in
social sciences.
• Solution: social science content does not get tagged with
‘acceleration’

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Mini case study:
SAGE Research Methods

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Mini case study:
SAGE Research Methods
• Improved consistency
• Ability to make global changes across a corpus

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Are we all doomed?

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Are we all doomed?
• Computers are still sub-human at processing natural
language
• Computers can’t read between the lines
• Computers still need to be taught and trained

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Thank you!
alan.maloney@sagepub.co.uk