Words to Numbers

When studying economic questions empirically, we often need to find numeric measures for constructs such as culture, trust, individual traits, strength of institutions, etc. However, most human interaction is not numeric, but verbal. Only recently, computer-based analytical methods have become available to study large amounts of text and speech data, in astringent, more objective way. This computer-linguistic revolution has great impact for all the social sciences, and economics in particular, because we now can apply these methods to distill complex concepts such as "trust" down to numbers.