This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Santosa, F. A., Lamba, M., George, C.

, Downie, J. S. (2024).
Coconut Libtool: Bridging Textual Analysis Gaps for Non-Programmers. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science
and Technology, 61. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions
for Use of Self-Archived Versions

Coconut Libtool: Bridging Textual Analysis Gaps for

Non-Programmers

Santosa, Faizhal Arif National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesia | [email protected]
Lamba, Manika University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA | [email protected]
George, Crissandra Case Western Reserve University, USA | [email protected]
Downie, J. Stephen University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA | [email protected]

ABSTRACT
In the era of big and ubiquitous data, professionals and students alike are finding themselves needing to perform a
number of textual analysis tasks. Historically, the general lack of statistical expertise and programming skills has
stopped many with humanities or social sciences backgrounds from performing and fully benefiting from such
analyses. Thus, we introduce Coconut Libtool (www.coconut-libtool.com/), an open-source, web-based application
that utilizes state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Coconut Libtool analyzes text data from
customized files and bibliographic databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Lens. Users can verify which
functions can be performed with the data they have. Coconut Libtool deploys multiple algorithmic NLP techniques at
the backend, including topic modeling (LDA, Biterm, and BERTopic algorithms), network graph visualization,
keyword lemmatization, and sunburst visualization. Coconut Libtool is the people-first web application designed to
be used by professionals, researchers, and students in the information sciences, digital humanities, and computational
social sciences domains to promote transparency, reproducibility, accessibility, reciprocity, and responsibility in
research practices.

KEYWORDS
Textual analysis tool; Open science; Text Mining; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Visualization; Bibliometrics

INTRODUCTION
Across almost every information organization is a rush of discussion surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), large
language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and more, demanding that information professionals
adapt to these changes, lead discussions, and contribute to these technological innovations. Within this surge of
advancement, many textual analysis tools have been created that integrate AI, LLMs, NLP, and machine learning
algorithms, combining both data analysis and visualization within one package. This integration of both textual
analysis and visualization results in “even more effective analysis of text data by making it easier to identify patterns,
outliers, and correlations that may not be readily apparent from the raw text alone” (Milev, 2023). TechMiner
(Velasquez, 2023), PyblioNet (Müller, 2023), Pybliometrics (Rose & Kitchin, 2019), pyBibX (Pereira et al., 2023),
metaknowledge (McLevey & McIlroy-Young, 2017), and litstudy (Heldens et al., 2022) are a few examples of tools
that have been developed to add value to the analysis of textual data. Other tools that can analyze text from various
sources include MoreThanSentiments (Jiang & Srinivasan, 2023) and TAll (Aria et al., 2023). It is necessary to have
a basic understanding of coding in order to use litstudy, metaknowledge, MoreThanSentiments, and pyBibX.
Furthermore, some must be installed before doing different analyses, which makes having adequate computational
resources essential.
With the advancements in research tools, an identified issue that has been highly prevalent is the barriers to access.
Open science has pushed to minimize these barriers by creating and promoting openly available tools, scholarly
publications, datasets, and more, resulting in a larger transition and transformation of open access across the library
and information science field (ACRL, 2018; ACRL, 2020). This transition and transformation have pushed the usage
of open-source software, technology, and techniques for textual analysis with the goal of fostering greater
transparency, collaboration, accessibility, reciprocity, and responsibility. R, Python, MALLET, KH Coder,
RapidMiner, WEKA, Orange, and Voyant Tools are a few examples of popular open-source tools available for

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researchers, with R and various R-packages being widely well-known due to the high popularity and availability of
this analysis and visualization tool (Thakur & Kumar, 2021). R-packages have even been further developed for
enhanced automated analyses, such as the open-source bibliometrix R-package (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017), adding
flexibility and swift integration for better user engagement. Open-source textual analysis tools with a simple graphical
user interface, like R and others mentioned, serve as a great solution for users to begin implementing these techniques
into their daily work and research (Lamba & Madhusudhan, 2022). With data mining and textual analysis being widely
adopted, resulting in an explosion of information, these difficult barriers of access still demonstrate use cases that
demand further improvement in a variety of sectors, including “differences in library types, financial constraints,
technological variations, human resource disparities, and varying levels of staff experience” (Santosa, Lamba, George,
2023). These powerful tools are only effective when users know how to use them (Seadle, 2016), which is where
limited competency in computing and programming plays a huge role in these barriers. In a systematic review of data
mining and textual analysis scholarly publications, Thakur and Kumar (2021) uncovered multiple barriers to access
to these tools, such as a “lack of skills, limited data sets in some domains, legal insecurity, technical problems,
improper infrastructure and support for conducting text mining on large corpus size.” While all these barriers cannot
be solved with one tool or one improvement, it demonstrates the need for continued innovation across the field of data
mining and textual analysis by addressing these highly prevalent barriers to further enhance the accessibility of these
timely data science methodologies and tools.
In this paper, we aim to address these challenges by introducing Coconut Libtool (www.coconut-libtool.com/), a
people-first web application designed to democratize textual analysis with its user-friendly interface. By removing the
need for software installation, incorporating a straightforward web-based design, and eliminating the need for coding
experience, this open-source tool breaks down the exclusivity surrounding data mining and textual analysis, therefore
expanding access to an even wider range of users. First, we will showcase the design of this tool, highlighting the
integration of AI, LLMs, NLP, and machine learning algorithms combined with the purposeful integration of user-
focused design choices. Along with the design of this tool, we will discuss how the Coconut Libtool addresses
challenges currently seen in the research landscape, exemplifying the implications of this open-source, user-friendly,
and comprehensive solution that is not only limited to the audience of information professionals but anyone and
everyone interested in data mining and textual analysis. It combines some freely accessible textual analysis
technologies, including (i) keyword stemming, (ii) bidirectional network analysis, (iii) topic modeling, and to perform
(iv) sunburst visualization (Figure 1). The code repository for the Coconut Libtool is available at
github.com/faizhalas/library-tools.

BACKEND FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS

Data Import and Pre-Processing
Coconut Libtool supports CSV or TXT files sourced from three bibliometric databases: (i) Scopus, (ii) Web of Science,
and (iii) Lens.org. Users can also upload their own customized data for textual analysis or visualization. In the process
of identifying the suitable type of analysis, particularly for customized files, the app has a menu called Coconut Libtool
File Checker. This feature helps to evaluate individual columns within the submitted dataset to facilitate the selection
of the desired technique. The data file undergoes a meticulous examination to ensure its completeness prior to parsing
and conversion into a structured pandas dataframe for subsequent analysis. Specifically, when importing data files
from Web of Science, which often include abbreviations such as ‘TI’ for ‘Title’ and ‘SO’ for ‘Source Title’, necessary
modifications are made. While files sourced from databases like Scopus and Web of Science typically include columns
for title, keywords, and abstract, additional fields such as publication year, citation count, document type, and source
title are imperative for sunburst visualization. For determining root keywords, NLTK's WordNet Lemmatizer and
Snowball Stemmer, accessible to all, serve as valuable tools (Bird, Loper, & Klein, 2009). Furthermore, to cater to
user preferences regarding the inclusion of various similar columns such as “Author Keywords” and “Keywords Plus,”
the ‘Keywords Stems’ functionality adeptly identifies columns containing the term “keyword.”
Text Analysis
In Coconut Libtool, ‘keywords stem’ and ‘topic modeling’ are two of the major text analysis techniques that users can
use. ‘Keywords stem’ is a text pre-processing feature in the app that includes lemmatization & stemming for locating
basic words and aids in catching the true meaning of the word, which can lead to improved semantic analysis and
comprehension of the text. The app uses NLTK WordNet Lemmatizer to lemmatize sentences and NLTK Snowball
Stemmer to stem the sentences. Users can utilize the ‘Keyword stem’ feature to identify root words. For example,
‘apples’ and ‘apple’ are the same, therefore ‘apples’will become ‘apple.’

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Another interesting feature in the Coconut Libtool for text analysis is ‘topic modeling’. Users can choose from three
different algorithms – (i) LDA (Blei et al., 2003), (ii) Biterm topic model (Yan, Guo, Lan, & Cheng, 2013), and (iii)
BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022) for topic modeling. LDAvis, which is useful for exploring topic-term relationships
and is based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model (Sievert & Shirley, 2014), biterm topic model, which works
well for modeling topics in short text (Yan, Guo, Lan, & Cheng, 2013), and BERTopic, a novel method that uses
class-based TF-IDF (Grootendorst, 2022). The app meticulously inspects each column within the pandas dataframe,
specifically targeting those in object form, and discards any irrelevant data. This functionality proves invaluable in
streamlining user analysis, particularly when handling custom files. By default, the app incorporates word stop
removal and lemmatization, enhancing the usability of the data. Moreover, users have the flexibility to opt for
additional enhancements (such as eliminating copyright statements, removing punctuation, and specifying stopwords
for exclusion) in addition to choosing their choice of topic modeling parameters, thereby optimizing the analysis
results.

Figure 1. Coconut Libtool App Workflow

Text Visualization
In Coconut Libtool, we used a ‘bidirectional network’ based on association rules (Santosa, 2023) and ‘sunburst’ (2024)
for text visualization. In bidirectional network analysis, the created rules can be visualized in the form of a network
graph where the included nodes can be selected according to preference, instead of having to include all nodes in the
visualization. In the case of custom files, proper node separation is crucial for accurate detection. Therefore, each node
must be delimited by a semicolon to ensure clear distinction and effective parsing between nodes.
Sunburst visualization helps to visualize the hierarchies between the documents and citations using Plotly (2024). It
is divided into 3 layers, where the innermost layer represents the ‘document type’, the middle layer represents the
‘source title’, and the outermost layer represents the ‘publication year’. The size of the slices is determined by the
number of documents owned, while the color of the slice is determined by the citations. In the outer layer, citations
are counted as much as it is owned, but in its inner layer, it is the weighted average of its outer layer.
Deployment
The app was made using the python’s streamlit (2024) package and was deployed using Hugging Face spaces. Coconut
Libtool can be run without requiring installation or downloading the application on the user's side and can be accessed
through the link Coconut Libtool, both on a computer and a mobile phone.
USER INTERFACE FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS
Coconut Libtool consists of 2 main menus, namely (i) ‘File Checker’ to check what kind of analysis can be done with
the user’s data and the (ii) ‘Analysis’ menu which consists of 4 features. Generally, users can upload files by drag and
drop method or by selecting files through browsing files.
In the ‘Keywords Stem’ feature, users can either choose (a)‘lemmatization’ (set as default) or (b)‘stemming’. The app
will automatically detect the keyword column for each bibliometric database. The output of this feature results in two
options – (i) ‘Result’ which displays the processed data; and (ii) ‘List of Keywords’ which provides the file containing
a list of past and modified keywords.

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The ‘Topic Modeling’ feature offers a range of options, including three distinct algorithms: pyLDA, Biterm, and
BERTopic. Users also have the flexibility to specify which columns to analyze from the uploaded data file. Coconut
Libtool meticulously examines each relevant column for analysis, empowering users to select the column they prefer
for topic modeling through the ‘choose column’ option. The primary task for users is to ascertain the optimal number
of topics and, if needed, fine-tune certain advanced parameters accessible within the advanced settings. In pyLDA,
users can adjust the ‘random state’ and ‘chunk size’, while in Biterm they can choose the ‘random state seed’ and
‘iteration number.’ More complex options are available for BERTopic, where users can adjust ‘top_n_words’,
‘n_components’, ‘random_state’, and ‘n_neighbors’. Additionally, users can select embedding models of their choice
from these three options: (i) all-MiniLM-L6-v2, (ii) en_core_web_md, and (iii) paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-
L12-v2. The topic modeling feature generates interactive visualizations based on the outcomes provided by each
algorithm python library. (Figure 2).
Preprocessing in the ‘bidirected network’ feature is similar to the ‘Keywords Stem’ where users can set the values for
‘support’, ‘confidence’, and ‘maximum length for the generated itemsets’ to filter the number of nodes to be displayed.
The filtered data then appears in the form of a table, where the selected nodes can be viewed. Users can save the
visualization by right-clicking and selecting ‘save image’ option.
‘Sunburst’ is the last feature of the app which is useful for viewing the diversity of the number of articles and citations
from the sources it owns. The colors indicate the depth of citations while the number of articles is depicted in the size
of the slice. Filters can be used based on the time range available in the year column of the uploaded data.

Figure 2. Example Visualization of the Results from a) pyLDA and b) Bidirected Network

DISCUSSION, CONCLUSION, AND FUTURE WORK

The Coconut Libtool provides a comprehensive solution that requires no software installation and offers multiple
functionalities within one interface. By supporting various analytical methods and accepting diverse types of textual
data inputs, the tool promotes flexibility and customization in textual analysis. By putting people first, Coconut Libtool
has significant implications for both information professionals and researchers across various disciplines by:
(i) Offering a user-friendly interface and eliminating the need for coding expertise, the Coconut Libtool makes textual
analysis more accessible to a wider audience, including those without technical backgrounds. This democratization
of access can empower individuals from diverse fields to leverage textual analysis techniques for their research or
professional endeavors.
(ii) Integrating multiple analytical methods within one tool, streamlining the analysis process, and saving time and
effort for users. Researchers can perform diverse analyses without switching between platforms, leading to increased
efficiency and productivity in their work.
(iii) Fostering collaboration and interdisciplinary research efforts. Researchers from different fields can utilize the
tool to analyze textual data relevant to their domains, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration.

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(iv) Promoting transparency, reproducibility, accessibility, reciprocity, and responsibility in research practices.
Researchers can openly share methods and findings, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing within their
disciplinary communities.
Coconut Libtool has a few limitations that we are striving to ameliorate in our future work. We are working on: (i)
expanding bibliographic data sources (e.g. Dimensions.ai and PubMed); (ii) providing more text analysis and
visualization options (e.g., burst detection and scattertext); (iii) overcoming runtime constraints; and, (iv)
incorporating languages beyond English. However, Coconut Libtool represents a significant advancement in the field
of textual analysis, offering a user-friendly and publicly accessible solution that empowers information professionals,
researchers, and learners to explore and analyze textual data more effectively.

GENERATIVE AI USE
We confirm that we did not use generative AI tools/services to author this submission.
AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION
FAS: conceptualization, formal analysis, software, methodology, data curation, writing-original draft
ML: conceptualization, investigation, project administration, supervision, writing-original draft, writing-review &
editing
CG: methodology, writing-original draft
JSD: supervision, writing-review & editing
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