CLARIN ERIC is a research infrastructure through Europe and beyond to encourage the sharing and sustainability of language data and tools for research in the humanities and social sciences.  We are pleased to announce that our functions for text analysis in Google Sheets were featured in the July 2019 issue of the CLARIN Newsflash.

Spreadsheets are an increasingly popular way of storing all kinds of information, including text, and giving it some informal structure, and systems like Google Sheets are especially popular for collaborative work and sharing data.

In response to the demand for standard natural language processing (NLP) tasks in spreadsheets, we have developed a Google Sheets add-on that provides functions to carry out the following tasks on text cells using GATE Cloud services:
named entity recognition (NER) for standard text (e.g. news) in English, French, or German;
NER tuned for tweets in English, French, or German;
named entity linking using our YODIE service in English, French, or German;
veracity reporting for rumours in tweets.

We have demonstrated this work several times, most recently at the IAMCR conference "Communication, Technology and Human Dignity: Disputed Rights, Contested Truths", which took place on 7–11 July at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. There we used it to show how organisations monitoring the safety of journalists could automatically add information about entities and events to their spreadsheets. Potential users have said it looks very useful and they would like access to it as soon as possible.

Google sheet showing Named Entity and Linking applications run over descriptions of journalist killings from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) databases

We are applying to have this add-on published in the G Suite Marketplace, but the process is very slow, so we are making the software available now as a read-only Google Drive document that anyone can copy and re-use. 

The document contains several examples and instructions are available from the Add-ons → GATE Text Analysis menu item. The language processing is actually done on our servers; the spreadsheet functions send the text to GATE Cloud using the REST API and reformat the output into a human-readable form, so they require a network connection and are subject to rate-limiting. You can use the functions without setting up a GATE Cloud account, but if you create one and authenticate while using this add-on, rate-limiting will be reduced.

Open this Google spreadsheet, then use File → Make a copy to save a copy to your own Google Drive (you can’t edit the original). For the functions to work, you will have to grant permission for the scripts to send data to and from GATE Cloud services and to use your user-level cache.

This work has been supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 687847 (COMRADES) and No 654024 (SoBigData).