APPLYING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP) TO ASSESS HEALTH OF MARINE CORPS CULTURE

The Marine Corps’ 38th Commandant calls for a force that can “affect the behavior of real-world pacing threats” through its “innovation, ingenuity, and willingness to continually adapt to and initiate changes in the operating environment.” Having a healthy and inclusive environment is vital to the Marine Corps’ success in developing and maintaining a force that can rise to the higher standard. Currently, the closest snapshot of the health of Marine Corps culture is collected via command climate surveys, which contain quantitative and free-response questions. Senior levels of Marine Corps leadership do not gain value from the free-text data because 1) analysis on free-text comments is time consuming and no analysis is done on those comments for the commander, and 2) there is no trend analysis on the aggregate of surveys over time and throughout commands, so they are not commander specific. This thesis developed a tool to gain value from free-text comments; it applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques, specifically topic extraction and sentiment analysis, on free-text comments from command climate surveys to provide a quantitative analysis on the health of culture in Marine Corps units. This approach can also be replicated to other services and can inspire efforts that will positively impact talent management and retention.Captain, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited