Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software program designed by James W. Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis. LIWC is able to calculate the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts. Within emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech, LIWC allows you to determine the rate at which the authors/speakers use positive or negative emotion words, self-references, big words, or words that refer to sex, eating, or religion. The program was designed to analyze simply and quickly over 70 dimensions of language across hundreds of text samples in seconds.

To learn more about the development and uses of LIWC, click the 'How LIWC Works' button in the left menu.

The Regressive Imagery Dictionary (Martindale, 1975,1990) is a content analysis coding scheme designed to measure primordial vs. conceptual thinking. Conceptual thought is abstract, logical, reality oriented, and aimed at problem solving. Primordial thought is associative, concrete, and takes little account of reality. It is the type of thinking found in fantasy, reverie, and dreams. A running tally of category occurrences is kept, and final output consists of the categories and the percentage of words in a document that were assigned to each category. This output can then be subjected to statistical analyses. The Regressive Imagery Dictionary contains about 3000 words divided into twenty-nine categories designed to measure primordial content and another set of seven categories designed to measure conceptual thought, the inverse of primordial cognition. These categories were derived from the theoretical and empirical literature on regressive thought (Martindale, 1975, 1990). The rationale behind the dictionary is that psychological processes will be reflected in the content of a text. Thus, for example, the more primordial the thought involved in producing a text, the less abstract and the more drive- and sensation-oriented words it should contain. It should be noted that the view of regressive cognition upon which construction of the dictionary was based is not a narrowly psychoanalytic one but is closer to Werner's (1948) or Goldstein's views (1939). Thus, the construct that the dictionary ultimately measures might as well be called dedifferentiated thinking as regressive or primary process thinking. For these reasons, we use the terms conceptual vs. primordial thought.

Snowball is a language in which stemming algorithms can be easily represented. The Snowball compiler translates a Snowball script (a .sbl file) into either a thread-safe ANSI C program or a Java program. For ANSI C, each Snowball script produces a program file and corresponding header file (with .c and .h extensions). The language has a full manual, and the various stemming scripts act as example programs.

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

The IACAP exists to promote scholarly dialogue and research on all aspects of the computational and informational turn, and on the use of information and communication technologies in the service of philosophy.

Open source Python modules, linguistic data and documentation for research and development in natural language processing, supporting dozens of NLP tasks, with distributions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

True Knowledge, which uses natural language processing to understand and answer complex factual questions, is one of the coolest websites I’ve seen in a while. The answer engine is still locked up in a private beta test, but now third-party developers can add the service to their websites and applications.

Humans have an in-built ability to do mathematics even if they do not have the language to express it, a research team has suggested.

An interesting game.

So what makes good copy good? Perhaps we can find out by considering what’s made the best of the best…the best.

There are rare words, and there are rarer words, but only a very special word qualifies as a bona fide lost word. Of course, no word in the Compendium can be completely lost, or I could never have found it. To as great an extent as possible, I have trie

In all of his work - the plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems - Shakespeare uses 17,677 words. Of those 1,700 were first used by Shakespeare. Writers often invent words, either by creating new forms of existing words or coining new words outright, b

For many English-speakers, the following phrases are familiar enough to be considered common expressions, proverbs, and/or clichés. All of them seem to have originated with Shakespeare

A list of important unsolved problems in many sciences.

Awesome intro to online cogsci resources for students.

Top 10 scientists in their fields.