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.