We are excited to announce that Harmony, an open source Natural Language Processing tool for data harmonisation, is now available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network CRAN!
Previously, Harmony R could be installed using devtools.
Harmony can be used to compare questionnaire items across studies, find the best match for a set of items, and identify different versions of the same questionnaire. Harmony is a collaboration project between Ulster University, University College London, the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, and Fast Data Science. It has been funded by Wellcome as part of the Wellcome Data Prize in Mental Health, as well as UKRI.
To install Harmony, you can use the following command in your R console or R Studio:
install.packages("harmonydata")
We encourage you to try Harmony and let us know what you think! You can also follow us on Twitter @harmonydata for updates.
Here is a quick walkthrough on how to do it:
library(harmonydata)
instrument = load_instruments_from_file(path = "examples/GAD-7.pdf")
instrument_2 = load_instruments_from_file("https://medfam.umontreal.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/GAD-7-fran%C3%A7ais.pdf")
instruments = append(instrument, instrument_2)
match = match_instruments(instruments)
names(match)
#> [1] "questions" "matches" "query_similarity"
As you can see, the match object contains a lot of information about the best match for each question in the query instrument. This information can be used to harmonise the instruments and make them more comparable.
We hope this walkthrough is helpful. Let us know if you have any other questions.
I’m so excited to see what you can do with Harmony!
[Beta mode: we are currently testing this extension] We have developed a browser extension for Harmony called “Send to Harmony” which lets you send selected text to Harmony with a right-click. For PDFs, use the popup to paste your selected text. Send to Harmony enables users to send selected text to the Harmony Data Harmonization (https://harmonydata.ac.uk/) platform for analysis. This plugin provides a right-click or context menu item which allows users to easily bring text from into their harmonisations, making it easier to compare and analyze different measurement scales across research studies.
We have a number of exciting updates to Harmony including: some improvements to the R library which have been asked for by researchers around the world who have been using Harmony on studies in lots of different topics as well as making our own fine tuned large language model available in the web UI, which is José’s winning model from the DOXA challenge which ended on 10 January 2025. Harmony has its own Large Language Model!