text: An R-package for Analyzing Human Language

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Transformers have revolutionized language analysis. Never before has a new technology universally improved the benchmarks of nearly all language processing tasks: e.g., general language understanding, question - answering, and Web search. The transformer method itself, which probabilistically models words in their context (i.e. “language modeling”), was introduced in 2017 and the first large-scale pre-trained general purpose transformer, BERT, was released open source from Google in 2018. Since then, BERT has been followed by a wave of new transformer models including GPT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, XLNet, Transformer-XL, CamemBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, etc. The text package makes all of these language models and many more easily accessible to use for R-users; and includes functions optimized for human-level analyses tailored to social scientists.