TASS Community Edition

Text Analysis for Social Scientists: LIWC-style dictionary scoring over open lexicons: deterministic, provenance-first, driveable by humans (CLI) and by AI agents (MCP server). Apache-2.0, zero runtime dependencies, Node 18+.

TASS is built by SIM DAD LLC. This repository is the full Community Edition: the scoring engine, the tass CLI, the MCP server, the minimal local web GUI, and the reproducible-project container. The commercial GUI Edition adds a no-code desktop workbench, the inferential statistics suite, publication charts, and Excel/APA export on top of this exact engine; its methods, formulas, citations, and R-benchmark reports are public even where its code is not.

Why researchers use it

1. Deterministic. Same inputs, byte-identical outputs, on every OS. CI enforces a cross-platform determinism hash. Reproducibility is a product claim, not a hope.
2. Provenance travels. Every scoring run writes a manifest with tool and engine versions, input SHA-256 hashes, and each lexicon's license, class, and citation: the block a methods section needs.
3. Licensing is mechanical. Everything bundled is verified commercial-ok. Restricted resources (NRC, LIWC, GI) are never bundled; your own imports of them are flagged academic-only in every run that touches them.
4. Trace every number. tass exemplars and tass kwic connect any score back to quotable text.
5. Open dictionaries, forever. Every TASS-native dictionary is CC-BY-4.0 or ODC-BY, citation required, commercial use welcome, and installable by name from the public registry (SIM-DAD/tass-lexicons).

Quick start

The fastest route is npm (Node 18+):

npm install -g @simdad/tass-cli
tass help

Or from this repository:

npm install && npm run build
node packages/tass-cli/bin/tass.js help

To put the repo build on your PATH: on Windows run powershell -File packages/tass-cli/scripts/install-cli.ps1; on macOS or Linux run npm link inside packages/tass-cli. Then:

Score a CSV of documents against bundled sentiment lexicons:

tass score --input posts.csv --text-column text --lexicons vader,afinn --output scored.csv

Analyze a single text, no files involved:

tass analyze --text "What a wonderful day" --vader-rules

Author your own dictionary in a spreadsheet (tass template, fill it in, tass import-csv), install open ones by name (tass install politeness), archive any run as a reproducible .tassproj (tass project save), and prove it reproduces (tass project rerun).

For AI-driven analysis, tass mcp serves the whole engine as MCP tools over stdio. AGENTS.md is the operating contract for agents.

Documentation

• docs/METHODS.md: what TASS measures and how; read before reporting numbers.
• docs/API.md: the engine's semver contract.
• tass help <topic>: task-oriented help inside the CLI.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md (Apache-2.0, DCO sign-off, determinism and zero-dependency rules). Dictionary contributions go to the registry repo.

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Apache-2.0 © SIM DAD LLC. "TASS" is a SIM DAD LLC trademark; see NOTICE.