The Text-Package: An R-Package for Analyzing and Visualizing Human Language Using Natural Language Processing and Transformers

Abstract

The language that individuals use for expressing themselves contains rich psychological information. Recent significant advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL), namely transformers, have resulted in large performance gains in tasks related to understanding natural language. However, these state-of-the-art methods have not yet been made easily accessible for psychology researchers, nor designed to be optimal for human-level analyses. This tutorial introduces text, a new R-package for analyzing and visualizing human language using transformers, the latest techniques from NLP and DL. The text package provides user-friendly functions for both relatively small and large datasets, enabling researchers to test hypotheses in social sciences.