Course Description
This workshop teaches you how to build a complete, transparent pipeline for extracting structured knowledge from published scientific papers. You will go from a search query all the way to a visual causal knowledge graph, using only deterministic models, meaning every result is traceable back to an exact sentence in an exact paper.
The workshop is built around a real tool: rasoultilburg/SocioCausaNet, a model specifically trained to detect causal claims in social science text and extract the cause-effect pairs from them
What You Will Learn
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Bulk paper retrieval: Set up API access and use the eScience Center package to download papers on a topic of your choice.
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PDF to sentences: Extract text from PDFs, remove page elements and citations, and split the cleaned text into sentences.
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Causal claims: Use SocioCausaNet to identify sentences that express cause-and-effect relationships and mark the relevant spans.
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Harmonizing constructs: Explore three approaches for handling constructs that are described differently across papers: a published taxonomy, similarity groups, and clustering.
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The causal map: Turn causal pairs into a graph, explore causal chains, and trace each connection back to its original sentence.
Prerequisites
This workshop is for:
- Social science PhD students who want to make their literature reviews faster and more systematic
- Researchers interested in automating qualitative reviews
- Anyone who wants to extract and visualize the causal theory embedded in a field’s published literature
- People curious about NLP tools but with no background in machine learning
You need basic Python familiarity. Nothing else is assumed.
Reading Materials
TBA
Capacity
This course has a maximum capacity of 35 participants.
Time and Location
This workshop will be held on-site only at Eindhoven University of Technologyon December 16, 2026. Details will be provided to all attendees over email after registration for the workshop.
Workshops start from 9:30 to 16:30 with a lunch break from 12:30 to 13:30. Lunch will be provided courtesy of eScience Center.
Registration
This workshop is not yet open for registration.
Instructors
Rasoul Norouzi
Rasoul Norouzi is a PhD candidate in social science at Tilburg University. His research uses natural language processing to support theory development and refinement in the social sciences. He works on language models for causal information extraction from scientific text, graph-based methods for analyzing causal claims, and text mining to support transparent and reproducible research synthesis.
Dr Erik Tjong Kim Sang