#5 · closed · 6 comments
I see that you need to purchase an LIWC license to get access to the dictionary. So, I have purchased the software but I can’t figure out how to access the English Dictionary file which your Python package needs for it to work. Any pointers would be really helpful as to how to connect your python package to the LIWC dictionary easily e.g. where do I access/download the LIWC English file?
Hey, were you able to get it figured out? @illushka
No. Far as I gather after speaking to LIWC directly, this version of LIWC is now outdated.
@d0tN3t They have a protocol, so in principle, we should follow for sure :)
I have the same issue. The dictionary is encrypted or something. Any suggestion?
Hi all, after being politely contacted by the LIWC developers, I've decided that this line of inquiry is outside the scope of this repository. I originally started this project because I didn't completely understand how the standard LIWC application was producing its analysis — e.g., how it handles tokenization, since the official application processes entire text documents as input — and doing it myself in Python gave me more control over those types of details, and more transparency as to the precise nature of the output. (It also allowed me to stay in my familiar research environment — a mixture of Python modules and IPython notebooks — rather than open up a GUI and click around whenever I got to that step in the analysis.) I appreciate the interest, and I'm sure the LIWC developers wholly support all you researchers using LIWC to answer your research questions... legitimately and within the terms of the LIWC license. Because I also appreciate the amount of time and energy that the LIWC developers have put into producing the lexicon, I think it's best to comply with their request, so that they can continue to improve LIWC, and so that us LIWC users can continue to benefit from those improvements. They're good people 🤗 , and I don't want to discredit or disrespect their efforts. tl;dr: https://github.com/chbrown/liwc-python/#obtaining-liwc
 LIWC developers reached out again and asked me to delete details / comments here, which I have now done. They point out that this effort is "in contravention of Section 8 of the LIWC Terms of Use": > “you are not allowed to modify, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or use for any derivative works the LIWC program or any of the LIWC components for any purpose.”