Does your polarity table contains priority of checking words ? Which columns do you have in this polarity table ? Can you add columns to it ?   Using a simple data step with indexw() function can do the work, here, without using a polarity table, but just coding your example:   data _NULL_;      text = 'This is not good at all. ';      if indexw(text, 'not good') > 0 then polarity=-3; else  /* priority 1 */      if indexw(text,'good') > 0 then polarity = 3;                /* priority 2 */      put polarity=; run; ... View more

Below the 3 most common ways of getting there. data t1; input name $ age2; infile datalines missover; datalines; a1 1 a2 2 a3 3 a4 4 a5 4 a6 3 ;run; data t2; input name $ age1; infile datalines missover; datalines; a1 a1 a1 a1 a1 a2 a2 a2 a2 a2 a3 a3 a3 a3 a3 a3 a3 ; run; proc sql; create table want1 as select a.name, b.age2 as age from t2 as a left join t1 as b on t1.name=t2.name ; quit; data want2; merge t2 (in=int2) t1; by name; if int2; age=age2; drop age1 age2; run; data want3; set t2(rename=(age1=age)); if _n_=1 then do; dcl hash h1(dataset:'t1(keep=name age2 rename=(age2=age))'); h1.defineKey('name'); h1.defineData('age'); h1.defineDone(); end; h1.find(); run; A 4th option would be to create a format out of table t1.   Be aware that if the relationship between the two tables is many:many then the results between above three approaches will differ. ... View more