Designing a Natural Language Processing System to Support Social Science Research

The rapid development of machine learning has delivered new approaches, methods, and tools to multiple domains. I see potential for these developments, specifically natural language processing (NLP), to provide new insights, novel methods, and larger scale to social science research. However, novel NLP methods require substantial technical skills to implement. Some of the highest adoption of novel technical tools is in the area of social media analysis, where the volume of source material can overwhelm methods that rely on human capacity. My PhD dissertation aims to bridge the gap between NLP technologies and the unique needs of social science research by contributing to the development of an open-source NLP tool specifically tailored for social science researchers that reduces barriers to entry. The goal is to empower social science researchers by providing more opportunities to explore data in novel ways. This paper outlines the objectives, methodology, and expected outcomes of the proposed research study, which includes designing the development process, requirement analysis, prototyping an NLP tool, evaluating its usability and performance, and providing support for its integration into the research workflow.