Fast Data Science has been working on the Harmony project in collaboration with UCL, Ulster University, and Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Harmony is an open-source natural language processing tool designed to revolutionise mental health research as well as an AI research project.
We are pleased to announce the publication of a paper coming out from this collaboration, Using natural language processing to facilitate the harmonisation of mental health questionnaires: a validation study using real-world data, authored by Eoin McElroy, Thomas Wood, Raymond Bond, Maurice Mulvenna, Mark Shevlin, George B. Ploubidis, Mauricio Scopel Hofmann and Bettina Moltrecht, and published in BMC Psychiatry, which is part of Springer Nature. Our paper demonstrates Harmony’s ability to predict correlations in mental health questionnaires - how the cosine scores coming out of Harmony relate to real-world data correlations.
You can try Harmony at https://harmonydata.ac.uk
🤷 What does Harmony do?
👉 Psychologists and social scientists often have to match items in different questionnaires, such as ““I often feel anxious”” and ““Feeling nervous, anxious or afraid””.
👉 This is called harmonisation.
👉 Harmonisation is a time consuming and subjective process.
👉 Going through long PDFs of questionnaires and putting the questions into Excel is no fun.
✅ Enter Harmony, a tool that uses natural language processing and generative AI models to help researchers harmonise questionnaire items, even in different languages.
Harmony addresses a critical challenge in psychology and social sciences: harmonising text data from diverse questionnaires often found in PDF format. By leveraging AI and natural language processing, Harmony efficiently compares and aligns questionnaire items, enabling researchers to conduct longitudinal studies using datasets from multiple studies. This groundbreaking tool is helping to unlock the potential of existing data and accelerate mental health research.
Funded by Wellcome and UKRI Economic and Social Research Council, Harmony is freely available for researchers to download and customize. Join the open-source community and help shape the future of mental health research.
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This is an article based on my presentation on “The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Expert Investigations and the Preparation of reports” which I gave at the Expert Witness Conference on 20 May 2026.
Many companies and organisations have large datasets that are stored in a very unstructured format. For example, you could work for a US based healthcare provider or insurer and have patient records stored in a free text format such as HL7 files or PDFs. A building regulator, land registry, or mortgage provider may have texts and accompanying diagrams from thousands of building inspections or land title deeds. A patent attorney’s office may have records of patent applications in PDF format.
On 20 May, I attended the Expert Witness Conference in Dublin, Ireland, organised by La Touche Training. It was an eye opening event with a mixture of lawyers and expert witnesses in different fields from Ireland and abroad. The event was chaired by Mr Justice Michael Peart, with a keynote address by the Honourable Mr Justice David Barniville, President of the High Court of Ireland.
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