NVivo's autocoding for themes (legacy), sentiment analysis, and coding according to existing coding patterns utilize methods of artifical intelligence.  These features were released in NVivo for Windows in 2015.

Autocoding by Coding Patterns

This option uses supervised/user driven machine learning (transparent authoring as (available in Windows only). 
The user manually codes a percentage of data and then NVivo's AI uses those patterns to code the remainder of the data.

 

Coding for Sentiment

NVivo's AI searches for expressions of sentiment in the content. It looks at the sentiment of words in isolation.

NVivo cannot recognize sarcasm, double negatives, slang, dialect variations, idioms or ambiguity. The context of the text is not taken into account.  Autocoding in NVivo for Mac is limited to datasets only.

Please see the User Guide pages in our NVivo Support Search for more details.

 

Autocoding by Themes (Legacy)

Important: This feature was removed in NVivo 15.4 and is no longer available in current versions of NVivo. This information is retained for customers using NVivo 15.3 and earlier.

NVivo's AI identifies themes by analyzing the content of source data and the sentence structure within it. NVivo assigns significance to some themes over others based on how frequently each theme occurs in the material being analyzed. The themes are combined into groups and results are presented as a code for each broad idea, with child codes for each theme within that group.

The relevant content is coded to the codes that are created. The results are summarized in a coding matrix which shows the codes for each broad idea, and the number of coding references from each file.

Example from the Sample Project (where water is the high level/parent code)

Legacy Feature
Autocoding by Themes was discontinued in NVivo 15.4 due to low customer usage. This article is provided for reference for users working with earlier versions.