SAS Viya / SAS Visual Text Analytics Consultant for Sentiment Analysis Project

Project Title: SAS Viya / SAS Visual Text Analytics Consultant for Sentiment Analysis Project We are a small research unit within the University of Alberta looking to contract an experienced analyst to support a time-sensitive public sentiment analysis project. We are only looking for Canadian freelancers. Our team has been asked to gauge public sentiment regarding the Government of Alberta’s decision to fund nurse practitioners to independently open or lead primary care clinics in Alberta. We currently work with SAS, but we have not previously used SAS Visual Text Analytics or SAS Viya for sentiment analysis. Because of the tight project timeline, we are looking for an analyst or consultant who can help us design and complete the analysis efficiently. The goal of the project is to analyze public-facing text data to understand overall sentiment, key themes, and major areas of support, concern, or opposition related to nurse practitioner-led primary care clinics in Alberta. The dataset may include publicly available text such as news comments, social media posts, public statements, online discussion threads, survey comments, or other open-text sources. The final data source and volume will be confirmed before the work begins. The ideal consultant will have hands-on experience with SAS Visual Text Analytics, SAS Viya, sentiment analysis, text mining or natural language processing, topic modelling or theme identification, cleaning and preparing unstructured text data, creating interpretable outputs from open-text data, validating or checking the accuracy of sentiment results, and preparing clear summaries for a non-technical academic or policy audience. Experience with health policy, primary care, nursing, nurse practitioners, public opinion research, or Canadian health system topics would be an asset. We are looking for someone who can help with some or all of the following tasks: Review the project question and advise on the best SAS Visual Text Analytics approach. Prepare or clean the text dataset for analysis. Build or configure a sentiment analysis workflow in SAS Visual Text Analytics. Identify major themes, topics, and recurring concerns. Distinguish positive, negative, neutral, and mixed sentiment where possible. Help validate the accuracy and credibility of the sentiment classifications. Export findings into usable tables, summaries, or figures. Provide a brief explanation of the methods used. Prepare a concise summary of key findings for a research or policy audience. Expected deliverables may include a cleaned or analysis-ready dataset, sentiment analysis outputs, theme or topic summaries, tables or charts summarizing findings, a short methods note explaining the SAS Visual Text Analytics process, and a concise findings summary suitable for internal reporting. An optional brief walkthrough with our team would also be helpful so we understand the workflow. This project has a tight turnaround. Please indicate your availability, estimated timeline, and whether you can begin immediately or within the next few days. In your response, please include a brief summary of your experience with SAS Visual Text Analytics and SAS Viya, examples of similar sentiment analysis or text analytics projects you have completed, whether you have worked with public opinion, health policy, survey comments, social media, or news/comment data, your proposed approach to the project, estimated timeline, estimated cost or hourly rate, and any limitations or requirements such as access to SAS Viya, data format needs, or software permissions. We are specifically looking for someone with SAS Visual Text Analytics or SAS Viya text analytics experience. General sentiment analysis experience in Python, R, or other platforms may be helpful, but SAS-specific experience is preferred because our unit works in SAS. Please only reach out if you are a Canadian freelancer.