SOCRATES 2.0: Bridging the gap between researchers and social media data through natural language interactions

In order to help researchers who have to resort to time‐consuming work on collecting, analyzing, and visualizing social media data, we have developed a system, called the Social and Crowdsourced Activity Extraction System (SOCRATES). This tool supports researchers utilize a single, modularly architected, open‐sourced, and standardized platform for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing social media data. In this demonstration, a follow‐up to one we presented at ASIST 2014 (Matni, Choi, & Shah, 2014), we present “SOCRATES 2.0” with improved functionalities, more precisely, those that help users focus on their research problem(s) without spending time and effort dealing with details in data processing. Through a process of asking questions related to the users’ interests and requests for certain analyses, the system generates one sentence about a possible research statement and provides the collected data and analysis results with one click.