TASS is a native Windows desktop app for dictionary-based text analysis. Group comparisons, publication-quality visualizations, and APA citation blocks — all without writing a line of code.
LIWC-22 has been the default tool for dictionary-based text analysis in the social sciences for decades. But it has compounding limitations: it cannot handle large datasets, its dictionaries are opaque and proprietary, and it produces no built-in statistical comparisons or visualizations.
LIWC’s academic license now explicitly excludes anyone outside a university setting — researchers at think tanks, government agencies, nonprofits, and independent consultancies have no clean alternative that doesn’t require R or Python.
The free alternatives — Yoshikoder, psyLex, LIWCalike — all require coding. No no-code GUI tool offers group statistical comparisons, effect sizes, and publication-quality visualizations in a single package.
TASS is that alternative. Dictionary-based scoring at scale, group statistical comparisons, publication-quality visualizations, and APA citation blocks — all in a native Windows desktop application. A one-time purchase for roughly the cost of a single year of LIWC — no renewals, no recurring fees.
LIWC has been the default for decades. TASS is built to do everything LIWC does — and considerably more — at a lower price, with open and auditable dictionaries.
| Capability | TASS | LIWC |
|---|---|---|
| No coding required | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Large dataset support (100k+ entries) | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
| Open, transparent dictionaries | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
| Built-in group comparisons (t-test, ANOVA) | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
| Publication-quality visualizations | ✓ Yes | — Limited |
| Custom dictionary import | ✓ Yes | — Limited |
| Offline, local analysis | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| License price | ✓ $49.99 one-time | ✗ $54.95+ / year |
CSV, TXT, and XLSX support with batch file processing. A column-mapping wizard lets you designate text, group, and metadata columns. Rows are previewed read-only before analysis begins.
Dictionary scoring at word, entry, and document level. Multi-threaded processing distributes work across all CPU cores, with a real-time progress display and time estimates for large corpora.
Define groups by column values. Descriptive statistics, t-test, Mann-Whitney U, one-way ANOVA, Cohen’s d, and eta-squared are computed and visualized per category — ready to report.
CSV (full entry-level scores), Excel (multi-sheet workbook), and high-resolution PNG + SVG visualizations at 300 DPI. Every export includes a pre-formatted APA citation block for your methods section.
TASS is designed for social scientists, journalists, and domain experts who need professional-grade text analysis without the overhead of learning to code. Load your data, choose your dictionaries, run your analysis.
Join the waitlist →TASS ships with eight third-party dictionaries at v1.0 and is building 18 original T-Lex lexicons — each independently citable and freely available for academic and non-commercial use.
| Dictionary | Coverage | License |
|---|---|---|
| AFINN-165 | Sentiment valence | MIT |
| VADER Lexicon | Sentiment valence + intensity | MIT |
| Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0 | Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity | CC-BY |
| Brysbaert Concreteness Norms | Concreteness ratings (~40k words) | CC-BY |
| HurtLex | Hurtful and offensive language by category | CC-BY-SA under review |
| WordNet 3.1 | Full English lexicon + part-of-speech tags | Princeton |
| NLTK Stopwords | Function words, pronouns, prepositions, articles | Apache 2.0 |
| SentiWordNet 3.0 | Synset-level positive / negative / objective scores | CC-BY-SA under review |
Core tool: dictionary analysis, group comparisons, static visualizations, CSV/Excel export, saved projects, license system. Eight third-party dictionaries ship at launch.
Machine learning models (DistilBERT, LDA, NER), custom dictionary import, interactive dashboards, auto-updates, Linux support. T-Lex dictionaries 01–07 ship.
LLM integration (user API key), cloud-assisted processing for large corpora, Spanish NLP, SQL data connectors. Full 26-dictionary library complete.
The T-Lex Project is building 18 original, open-access lexicons for social science text analysis — each a citable, independently documented resource designed to fill real measurement gaps in the field. T-Lex dictionaries ship with TASS and are freely available to the research community under open-access licensing.
Contributors who make substantive contributions will be offered co-authorship on associated dictionary papers and are named in all published dictionary metadata. All TASS-native dictionaries are freely available for academic and non-commercial research use.
Buy once, own it forever. No subscription, no renewal, no surprise charges. All tiers include every feature — no artificial limits by price.
Larger lab or institutional licensing? Contact hello@simdadllc.com
TASS v1.0 is complete and targeting a May 2026 release. Join the waitlist and be notified first.
We’ll reach out when TASS launches.
Open source software
TASS is a commercial product built on open source software. Dictionary attributions are listed above. We also gratefully acknowledge the following software projects and their contributors.