PROVALIS RESEARCH
ANNOUNCEMENT - MAY 20, 2003

1. RELEASE OF WORDSTAT 4.0

Provalis Research is pleased to announce the release of WordStat version 4.0.

WordStat is a content analysis module specifically designed to analyze textual information such as responses to open-ended questions, interviews, titles, journal articles, public speeches, electronic communications, etc. WordStat may be used both for automatic categorization of text using a dictionary approach and for manual coding.

New features include:

• Dictionary moderated lemmatization and stemming (English only for now, other languages will be added later).
• Phrases finder to easily identify recurring phrases and idioms.
• Heatmap plot and dual-clustering to examining relationship between keywords and categorical or numerical variables.
• Clustering and multidimensional scaling of cases (records or documents) based on content similarity.
• Proximity plot to examine keywords co-occurrence or documents similarity in descending order of similarity.
• New drag'n drop dictionary editor for easy and quick assignment of words or phrases to dictionaries (may also be used to merge two dictionaries)
• Support for RTF documents (up to 10Mb per document) and larger memo fields (beyond the previous 64Kb limit)
• Direct importation of Word, WordPerfect and HTML documents from the editor.
• Customization of 2D and 3D multidimensional scaling charts, correspondence plots and bar charts (title, color, data point, data labels, etc.)
• Option to animate 3D multidimensional scaling charts and 3D correspondence plots (allows better visualization of all 3 dimensions).
• Descriptions may now be assigned to categories.
• 3D barcharts and line charts.
• Weighting of words or phrases in categories may now be performed using floating-point numbers (positive values only).
• Improved spell-checking with support for more than 10 different languages such as English, French, Spanish, etc.
• All tables may now be saved in Excel, text or html format.
• All changes made to the categorization dictionary or exclusion list may be canceled during a session.
• Automatic selection of inflected forms by suffix or WordNet relationship.
• Improve text editing (with undo).
• Miscellaneous changes, speed improvements, etc.

For more information: www.simstat.com/wordstat.htm


2. PRE-RELEASED VERSION OF CODEMINER (project name)

We are also working on a new text management and qualitative analysis software. This new software will be offered as an optional base module for WordStat. It will provide an easy way to manage documents and perform common qualitative analysis tasks such as: Storing of documents in Rich Text Format with support for graphics, tables, etc..

• Easy creation and edition of qualitative analysis coding systems.
• Drag and drop assignment of codes to text segments.
• Code retrieval, code comparison statistics, and text searching tools.
• Numerous visualization tools such as bar charts, line charts and correspondence analysis plots, clustering, concept mapping (MDS), and heatmaps.
• Code sequences analysis.
• Computation of 4 levels of inter-raters agreement (occurrence, frequency, code importance and coded segments).
• Ability to perform content analysis / text mining with the optional WordStat addon module on entire documents or on selected coded segments.
• Ability to perform statistical analysis on project files using Simstat statistical software.
• Saving of segments and comparison tables to disk (text, comma separated value, Excel, etc.)
• Etc.

While CodeMinder is still under beta testing,some people have expressed the wish to purchase the product immediately. We have thus decided to offer a pre-released version of CodeMiner at a special price of $150 ($100 for academic users) this represents almost 50% off the planned retail price (currently set to $295). Customers who will purchase this pre-released version will receive by email an electronic license file to unlock the beta version. When CodeMiner will be officially released, they will receive the final version for free (installation CD and manual). They will also be entitled to the same benefits as users who will purchase the official version 1.0.

For more information on CodeMiner, see: www.simstat.com/CodeMiner.htm

Best regards,

Normand Peladeau
Provalis Research
www.simstat.com