Developing Tools for Text Analysis of Survey Data

• Activity Number: 266
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2016 : 2:00 PM to 2:45 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Randall Powers* and Brandon Kopp and Wendy Martinez
• Companies: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Keywords: Survey data ; Text data ; Text analytics workflow ; Software tool development ; Statistical learning

Abstract

Many surveys at the Bureau of Labor Statistics have unstructured or semi-structured text fields. Most of these sources of text are not analyzed because users usually do not know what types of analyses can be done, and they lack easy-to-use and inexpensive tools to exploit the text data. This presentation will describe the BLS text analytics workflow, creation of the software tools, and an application using survey data.