Open AccessMachine learning and rule‐based automated coding of qualitative data
Author(s) -
Crowston Kevin,
Liu Xiaozhong,
Allen Eileen E.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14504701328
Subject(s) - coding (social sciences) , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , qualitative analysis , machine learning , qualitative research , social science , statistics , mathematics , sociology
Large volumes of textual data pose considerable challenges for manual qualitative analysis. We explore semi‐automatic coding of textual data by leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP). We compare the performance of human‐developed NLP rules to those inferred by machine learning (ML) algorithms. The results suggest that NLP with ML may be useful to support researchers coding qualitative data.