ConTEXT-Explorer

ConTEXT Explorer is an open Web-based system for exploring and visualizing concepts (combinations of co-occurring words and phrases) over time in the text documents. ConTEXT Explorer is designed to lower the barriers to applying information retrieval and machine learning for text analysis, including:

• preprocessing text with sentencizer and tokenizer in a Spacy pipline;
• building Gensim word2vec model for discovering similar terms, which can be used to expand queries;
• indexing the cleaned text, and creating a search engine using Whoosh, which allows to rank sentences using the Okapi BM25F function;
• visualizing results across time in interactive plots using Plotly.

It is designed to be user-friendly, enabling researchers to make sense of their data without technical knowledge. Users may:

• upload (and save) a text corpus, and customize search fields;
• add terms to the query using input from the word2vec model, sentence ranking, or manually;
• check term frequencies across time;
• group terms with "ALL" or "ANY" operator, and compound the groups to form more complex queries;
• view results across time for each query (using raw counts or proportion of relevant documents);
• save and reload results for further analysis;
• download a subset of a corpus filtered by user-defined terms.

More details can be found in the user manual below.

How to install

Get the app

Clone this repo to your local environment:

git clone https://github.com/alicia-ziying-yang/conTEXT-explorer.git

Set up environment

ConTEXT Explorer is developed using Plotly Dash in Python. We are using Python 3.7.5 and all required packages listed in requirement.txt. To help you install this application correctly, we provide a conda environment file ce-env.yml for you to set up a virtual environment. Simply enter the folder:

cd conTEXT-explorer

and run:

conda env create -f ce-env.yml

To activate this environment, use:

conda activate ce-env

Install the application

Then, ConTEXT Explorer can be easily installed by:

pip install . 

Run the app

• If you want to run ConTEXT Explorer on your local computer, comment the code for ubuntu server, and uncomment the last line in app.py:

  app.run_server(debug=False, host="0.0.0.0") # ubuntu server

  app.run_server(debug=False, port="8010") # local test

  To start the application, use:

  start-ce

  or

  python app.py

  The IP address with app access will be displayed in the output.

• If you want to run ConTEXT Explorer on an ubuntu server, use:

  nohup python app.py &

How to use

A sample corpus with a saved analysis is preset in this app. Feel free to explore the app features using this example. Please check more details in the manual below.

Click here to view the paged PDF version

Contact and Contribution

This application is designed and developed by Ziying (Alicia) Yang, Gosia Mikolajczak, and Andrew Turpin from the University of Melbourne in Australia.

If you encounter any errors while using the app, have suggestions for improvement, or want to contribute to this project by adding new functions or features, please submit an issue here and pull requests.