TASS scores text against open, citable dictionaries and shows its work. Same inputs, byte-identical outputs, every time. Every run writes a manifest recording versions, input hashes, licenses, and citations: the record a methods section and a replication both need.
Both editions run the same deterministic engine and produce the same manifests. The Community Edition is free forever and open source. The GUI Edition adds the no-code desktop workflow, inferential statistics, and publication output.
Free forever
The full scoring engine for people comfortable at a command line, and for AI agents driving it over MCP.
From $59, own it outright · pricing
The no-code desktop workbench: import a corpus, score it, test it, chart it, and archive the whole run, without writing a line of code.
Every claim below describes a shipping capability, documented in the public methods reference and user guide.
The engine has no clocks and no randomness: fixed column orders, stable sorts, one fixed-precision number formatter. A .tassproj archive seals a complete run; tass project rerun re-executes it and byte-compares every artifact. The answer is REPRODUCED, or a precise report of what moved.
Every run writes a manifest: tool and engine versions, SHA-256 of each input, and each lexicon's name, license, license class, and citation. Every bundled dictionary is open and verified for any use. Restricted resources such as LIWC or NRC are never bundled; if you import a copy you have licensed, TASS flags every run that touches it.
Welch and Student t, Mann-Whitney, ANOVA variants, Kruskal-Wallis, post-hoc tests, effect sizes, assumption checks, and Benjamini-Hochberg correction, each validated against R 4.6 golden files with agreement typically to 1e-13. The benchmark report is public, and every comparison can emit a base-R script that reproduces the run independently.
A clean-room implementation of the published VADER heuristics (negation, boosters, ALL-CAPS, punctuation, but-clauses, emoticons, idioms) over the bundled MIT-licensed VADER lexicon. It can differ from the reference package in corner cases, so TASS reports it as "TASS VADER-rules compound", never as a canonical VADER score.
The MCP server exposes the full workflow (18 tools with statistics and charts installed) to Claude or any MCP client. The division of labor is deliberate: your agent drives, the deterministic engine scores, and TASS itself never calls a model. Agent-produced labels join a corpus with explicit external-classifier provenance.
Exemplars return the top and bottom documents for any category with their matched terms; KWIC gives a keyword-in-context concordance. The validation workspace samples matches for human review and reports precision and coder agreement, so dictionary fit becomes evidence instead of hope.
Every bundled dictionary is verified for any use, including commercial. Each run records the name, license, and citation of every lexicon it touched in its provenance manifest. More install free by name from the public registry, integrity-checked against a pinned SHA-256.
| Dictionary | Coverage | License |
|---|---|---|
| AFINN-165 | Sentiment valence (−5 to +5 per word) | Apache 2.0 |
| VADER Lexicon | Sentiment valence + intensity (rule model) | MIT |
| labMT 1.0 | Happiness (hedonometric) valence | CC-BY |
| Empath | 194 topical and affective categories | MIT |
| SocialSent (2000s) | Domain-induced historical sentiment | PDDL |
| Warriner VAD | Valence, arousal, dominance norms | CC-BY 4.0 |
| Brysbaert Concreteness Norms | Concreteness ratings (~40k words) | CC-BY 4.0 |
| Kuperman Age-of-Acquisition | Age-of-acquisition norms (~30k words) | CC-BY 4.0 |
| stopwords-iso (English) | Function words and stopwords | MIT |
| TASS Politeness Markers v1 | 15 politeness-strategy categories | CC-BY 4.0 |
Full citations for every dictionary are printed by tass dicts, written into every manifest, and listed in the methods reference. Bring your own too: author a dictionary in any spreadsheet and import it with row-numbered validation, or import a LIWC-format .dic file you have licensed (flagged academic-only in every run's provenance).
T-Lex is TASS's program of original, citable dictionaries for social science text analysis. Every T-Lex dictionary is released under CC-BY-4.0 (ODC-BY for ratings databases): citation required, any use permitted including commercial, never paywalled, in every edition. Each ships versioned in the public registry, installable by name with tass install, together with the authoring memo and a validation report produced with TASS's own validation workspace.
Fifteen politeness-strategy categories approximating the Stanford politeness taxonomy at the lexical and phrase level. Bundled with every edition.
Anger, fear, joy, sadness, anticipation, trust, surprise, disgust. An original, openly licensed alternative where the incumbent resource is restricted to academic use.
Hedges, boosters, evidentials, and deontic and epistemic modality in one coherent scheme.
Evaluative language calibrated for social science text corpora.
Authority, dominance, deference, and political-arena language.
Agentic and communal language across competence, warmth, and affiliation.
A harmonization and coverage-extension layer over the bundled Warriner VAD norms, targeting modern vocabulary gaps. ODC-BY.
T-Lex entries are community projects with named, cited co-authors, not anonymous donations. Contributors review and validate word lists against published measurement frameworks, re-score items that need domain expertise, and supplement seed lists from their specialization. Substantive contributors are offered co-authorship on the associated dictionary paper and are named in the dictionary metadata.
Interested? Write to tass@simdadllc.com with your field and the constructs you care about, or read CONTRIBUTING in the registry.
One-time purchase, no subscription. Every GUI Edition license includes all v1.x updates; later major versions are optional paid upgrades. No cart archaeology, no sales call to learn a number.
Site and department licenses start at $1,995; write to tass@simdadllc.com for a quote you can put in a budget before talking to anyone. Every purchase carries an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee; see the refund policy. Dictionaries are never a paid feature in any edition.
Ahead of the public launch, we are opening the GUI Edition to researchers who will use it on their own data and help shape the first release. Participation is free for the duration of the beta, and beta installers ship through this program.
The beta is open to people currently affiliated with a university or an established research institution. Apply from your institutional email address; we use it to confirm eligibility. A short note about your institution, your field, and how you would like to use TASS helps us place you.
Apply from your institutional email