Using Natural Language Processing to Understand People and Culture

Language can provide important insights into people, and culture more generally. Further, the digitization of information has made more and more textual data available. But by itself, all that data are just that: data. Realizing its potential requires turning that data into insight. We suggest that automated text analysis can help. Recent advances have provided novel and increasingly accessible ways to extract insight from text. While some psychologists may be familiar with dictionary methods, fewer may be aware of approaches like topic modeling, word embeddings, and more advanced neural network language models. This article provides an overview of natural language processing and how it can be used to deepen understanding of people and culture. We outline the dual role of language (i.e., reflecting things about producers and impacting audiences), review some useful text analysis methods, and discuss how these approaches can help unlock a range of interesting questions. Public Significance Statement This article offers an integrative discussion of how automated text analysis can be used to shed light on people and culture. It reviews recent methods and explains how they can be applied by nonspecialists to answer a range of research questions.