Workshop Schedule
September 30, 2026 · Tilburg University
The workshop runs from 10:00 to 16:00, following the same day rhythm as the main conference. Coffee is available on arrival, and there is a break in each half of the day.
| Time | Session | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 09:45 – 10:00 | Arrival and coffee | |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Welcome and setup | Introductions, environment check, plan for the day |
| 10:15 – 11:00 | Bulk paper retrieval | Talk: finding and downloading papers at scale |
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Coffee break | |
| 11:15 – 12:00 | Bulk paper retrieval: hands-on | Build a corpus from a search query of your own |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 13:00 – 14:15 | From PDFs to causal claims | Cleaning paper text into sentences, then extracting cause and effect |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | Coffee break | |
| 14:30 – 15:45 | Harmonizing constructs and building the map | Grouping constructs that mean the same thing, then assembling the causal map |
| 15:45 – 16:00 | Wrap-up and questions | Open questions and how to apply this to your own research |
What We Cover
Morning: building a corpus
Netherlands eScience Center
A talk followed by a hands-on session on getting the papers in the first place. How bulk retrieval works, what the eScience Center download package does, and how to get from a search query to a folder of papers and metadata on your own machine.
By the end of the morning you have your own corpus on a topic you choose.
Afternoon: from papers to a causal map
Rasoul Norouzi, Tilburg University
The rest of the pipeline, in four steps:
- PDF to sentences. Extracting text from PDFs and cleaning it: dropping running heads and page furniture, joining broken paragraphs, splitting into sentences, stripping inline citations and statistics. We also look at what got thrown away and why, because that is where most mistakes hide.
- Sentences to causal claims. Running SocioCausaNet over the sentences to find the ones that state a cause and an effect, and to mark the two spans. Every relation keeps the sentence, page and document it came from.
- Harmonizing constructs. The same construct is worded differently in every paper. Three ways to deal with that: map the spans onto a published taxonomy such as ELSST or the APA thesaurus, group them by similarity, or cluster them and name the clusters. We compare what each route gives you and where each one breaks.
- The causal map. Assembling the harmonized pairs into a graph, looking at which constructs connect the most, following causal chains, and tracing any edge back to the sentence it came from.
By the end of the day you have a causal map built from the papers you downloaded in the morning, and a pipeline you can run again on your own literature.
Nothing in the pipeline is generated or paraphrased. Every relation in the final map points back to the exact sentence, page and paper it came from.
Preparation Before the Workshop
You can follow the workshop either on your own machine or in Google Colab. Choose one and have it working before you arrive, so we can start on time.
On your own machine
- Install the latest version of Python from python.org/downloads.
- Have a working notebook environment: either Jupyter, or VS Code with the Jupyter extension (setup guide).
- Open a notebook and run a cell before the day, so you know it works.
In Google Colab
- Nothing to install. Make sure you have an active Google account you can sign in with on the day (create one).
The workshop package is not ready to install yet. Setup instructions will be posted on this page in a few days. Please check back shortly before the workshop.
- Create a free account at huggingface.co so you can load models from the Hub during the workshop.
- Skim the model card for rasoultilburg/SocioCausaNet so the model is not new to you on the day.
We assume everyone who registered will attend. If your plans change, please email r.norouzinijeh@tilburguniversity.edu so we can adjust the catering numbers.