Automatic Language Processing for the Social Sciences

Most textual data available today enable us to see the social sciences in a new light, as texts contain an abundance of as yet unexploited information. The difficulty consists in accessing the right information, in “standardizing” it and then in putting it into context, since it has to be formatted to be exploitable by other automatic tools. This article presents a range of automatic language processing techniques presently in use, and examines a set of examples that help to show not only what works but also where the limits of current systems lie.