%0 Generic %D 2018 %T Readme2: An R Package for Improved Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science %A Connor T. Jerzak %A Gary King %A Anton Strezhnev %X

An R package for estimating category proportions in an unlabeled set of documents given a labeled set, by implementing the method described in Jerzak, King, and Strezhnev (2019). This method is meant to improve on the ideas in Hopkins and King (2010), which introduced a quantification algorithm to estimate category proportions without directly classifying individual observations. This version of the software refines the original method by implementing a technique for selecitng optimal textual features in order to minimize the error of the estimated category proportions. Automatic differentiation, stochastic gradient descent, and batch re-normalization are used to carry out the optimization. Other pre-processing functions are available, as well as an interface to the earlier version of the algorithm for comparison. The package also provides users with the ability to extract the generated features for use in other tasks.

(Here's the abstract from our paper: Computer scientists and statisticians are often interested in classifying textual documents into chosen categories. Social scientists and others are often less interested in any one document and instead try to estimate the proportion falling in each category. The two existing types of techniques for estimating these category proportions are parametric "classify and count" methods and "direct" nonparametric estimation of category proportions without an individual classification step. Unfortunately, classify and count methods can sometimes be highly model dependent or generate more bias in the proportions even as the percent correctly classified increases. Direct estimation avoids these problems, but can suffer when the meaning and usage of language is too similar across categories or too different between training and test sets. We develop an improved direct estimation approach without these problems by introducing continuously valued text features optimized for this problem, along with a form of matching adapted from the causal inference literature. We evaluate our approach in analyses of a diverse collection of 73 data sets, showing that it substantially improves performance compared to existing approaches. As a companion to this paper, we offer easy-to-use software that implements all ideas discussed herein.)

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