harmony

Troubleshooting Harmony

Troubleshooting Harmony

Troubleshooting Harmony

Harmony didn’t find anything in my PDF

Harmony tends to perform better if you upload a file with item numbers.

If there are are no question numbers in the instrument, it’s very hard for Harmony to distinguish question text from other content such as the copyright information. Click here to see an example PDF with question numbers included.

Also, if your PDF is a scanned document, please see if you can find a fully digitised (OCR’ed) version of the document.

We suggest either finding a file with question numbers or better quality content. Or try a different file format such as Word, Excel or CSV. We have guidance on formatting your files for Harmony.

Harmony supports:

  • Word
  • Excel
  • CSV
  • PDF - however if you are having problems parsing PDFs please try another format.

Finally, feel free to raise an issue to let us know that your PDF isn’t being parsed. Please also share the PDF in question. Harmony is an open source tool for social sciences research.

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Related Posts

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

Improving Harmony's PDF extraction with user testing

Since we built Harmony, a common complaint has been that it frequently identifies the wrong questions in PDFs. The original algorithm for finding questions in PDFs was a mixture of rule based heuristics and some hand coded logic to look for e.g. lines in the document which begin with numbers. This was very fragile and worked fine on short questionnaires such as the GAD-7, but failed on larger documents. We decided to run a competition with our partner DOXA AI where members of the public could train their own model to extract questions from PDFs.
Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and DataMind Data Science Workshop

Harmony at MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop On 2 May 2025, Dr Eoin McElroy demonstrated Harmony at the MQ and Datamind Data Science workshop in Deutsche Bank. Eoin’s presentation focused on “Maximising the use of existing survey data: facilitating cross-study research using retrospective harmonization.” The workshop brought together researchers interested in applying novel harmonisation techniques to existing datasets. Eoin explained traditional harmonisation processes and presented a user-friendly guide to the Harmony tool, demonstrating how natural language processing can streamline the harmonisation process.

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