RTextTools has largely been used for topic classification in the social sciences. However, recent discussions with researchers at various universities have demonstrated that the package can be applied to a host of problems in the natural sciences as well.One such application is using text classification to identify breast cancer ... [Read more...]

Attached are some of the materials from the recent short course at UNC. For confidential reasons, we are unable to present all of the materials, but this is enough to get someone started. 1. Lecture; 2. Intro to R; 3. NY Times; 4. [...] [Read more...]

This week the Odum Institute at UNC held a two day short course on text classification with RTextTools. The workshop, led by Loren Collingwood, covered the basics of content analysis, supervised learning and text classification, introduction to R, and how to use RTextTools. Participants brought in their own data on ... [Read more...]

RTextTools v1.3.5 addresses some key concerns that have been raised in recent months. Many of the algorithms used in RTextTools require that any new data presented to a trained classifier contain the same features as the original document-term matrix. Since this rarely (if ever) happens in the real world, I ... [Read more...]

RTextTools was updated to version 1.3.2 today, adding support for n-gram token analysis, a faster maximum entropy algorithm, and numerous bug fixes. The source code has been synced with the Google Code repository, so please feel free to check out a copy and add your own features!With the core feature ... [Read more...]

A core focus of the RTextTools project has been to make the package as accessible and user-friendly as possible. In its early iterations, the package contained dependencies such as RWeka, openNLP, and [...] [Read more...]

RTextTools bundles a host of functions for performing supervised learning on your data, but what about other methods like latent Dirichlet allocation? With some help from the topicmodels package, we can get started with LDA in just five steps. Text in [...] [Read more...]

RTextTools v1.3 was released on August 21, and the package binaries are now available on CRAN. This update fixes a major bug with the stemmers, and it is highly recommended you upgrade to the latest version. Other changes include optimization of existing functions and improvements to the documentation.Additionally, Duncan Temple ... [Read more...]

RTextTools v1.2 was released today and we're pleased to announce that the package is finally available on CRAN. Additionally, this update brings minor changes to the API, improvements to the GLMNET algorithm, and more comprehensive documentation. Get started by following our installatio [...] [Read more...]

We recently created an AMI for Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Users with AWS accounts can access the public AMI by searching ami-817eb8e8. The AMI is based off of Drew Conway's excellent AMI, but with R 2.13 loaded and RTextTools and [...] [Read more...]

A major upgrade of RTextTools has been released, including many optimizations, UI changes, and features based on feedback from the 2011 CAP Conference in Catania. Changes include the addition of a new low-memory algorithm GLMNET, full user documentation, simplification of the user interface, bundled datasets, better analytics for both virgin a [...] [Read more...]

Since RTextTool's unveiling at the 2011 Cap Conference in Catania, the development team has been busy working on refinements to the package. This includes a number of changes to simplify the API, improve analytics, decrease memory use, and increase functionality. We've added support for another low-memory algorithm (GLMNET) in addition to ... [Read more...]

With RTextTools now released and the feedback rolling in, the development team is getting the ball rolling on the help documentation for the library. Currently, you cannot access help files about the library or its functions from within R. However, we do offer a draft of a quick start guide ... [Read more...]

The biggest complaint we had during the installation process was that Xcode (account required) and Rtools were required for MacOS X and Windows. Today we released universal binaries (PPC/i386/x86_64) for MacOS 10.5+ as well as binaries (i386/x86_64) for Windows. This addition wil [...] [Read more...]

When we first wrote RTextTools, we opted to use RWeka for boosting and bagging algorithms for lack of a better alternative. We've discovered that this leads to all sorts of ugly rJava installation issues across platforms and prevents our users from getting started quickly. Recently, we've stumbled upon two excellent ... [Read more...]

After several weeks trying to find the source of a bug in the maximum entropy library when compiling on Windows, Dirk Eddelbuttel pointed me in the right direction to resolve the issue. Although it required a re-write of the library using the new Rcpp API, maximum ent [...] [Read more...]

In preparation for The 4th Annual Conference of the Comparative Policy Agendas Project in Catania, Sicily, our development team has been busy drafting the documentation for RTextTools. In addition to standard documentation of functions, we want to provide quick-start guides, sample datasets, example scripts, and [...] [Read more...]

One key limiting factor for automated text classification is memory consumption. As you accumulate more news articles, bills, and legal opinions, the term-document matrices used to represent the data grow quickly. RTextTools provides two algorithms, support vector machines and maximum entropy, that can handle large datasets with very little memory. ... [Read more...]

Right now our development team is busy preparing a conference release of RTextTools for The 4th Annual Conference of the Comparative Policy Agendas Project at the University of Catania in Sicily. One of the key issues we've had thus far is memory consumption with very large datasets.In the past ... [Read more...]

The development team has spent the past six months creating the best possible experience for RTextTools users. A few months into development, we heard about a new IDE called RStudio, which has one of the cleanest interfaces to R we've seen. It integrates many R tools (graphing, file management, workspace ... [Read more...]