scholarly journals GOOD AND BAD SOCIOLOGY: DOES TOPIC MODELLING MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
MARIUSZ BARANOWSKI ◽  
PIOTR CICHOCKI
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Small Data ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
New Research

The changing social reality, which is increasingly digitally networked, requires new research methods capable of analysing large bodies of data (including textual data). This development poses a challenge for sociology, whose ambition is primarily to describe and explain social reality. As traditional sociological research methods focus on analysing relatively small data, the existential challenge of today involves the need to embrace new methods and techniques, which enable valuable insights into big volumes of data at speed. One such emerging area of investigation involves the application of Natural Language Processing and Machine-Learning to text mining, which allows for swift analyses of vast bodies of textual content. The paper’s main aim is to probe whether such a novel approach, namely, topic modelling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm, can find meaningful applications within sociology and whether its adaptation makes sociology perform its tasks better. In order to outline the context of the applicability of LDA in the social sciences and humanities, an analysis of abstracts of articles published in journals indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database on topic modelling was conducted. This study, based on 1,149 abstracts, showed not only the diversity of topics undertaken by researchers but helped to answer the question of whether sociology using topic modelling is “good” sociology in the sense that it provides opportunities for exploration of topic areas and data that would not otherwise be undertaken.

Topic modelling for qualitative studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergey I. Nikolenko ◽  
Sergei Koltcov ◽  
Olessia Koltsova
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Topic Models ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Topic Extraction ◽  
Quality Metric ◽  
Opinion Analysis

Qualitative studies, such as sociological research, opinion analysis and media studies, can benefit greatly from automated topic mining provided by topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). However, examples of qualitative studies that employ topic modelling as a tool are currently few and far between. In this work, we identify two important problems along the way to using topic models in qualitative studies: lack of a good quality metric that closely matches human judgement in understanding topics and the need to indicate specific subtopics that a specific qualitative study may be most interested in mining. For the first problem, we propose a new quality metric, tf-idf coherence, that reflects human judgement more accurately than regular coherence, and conduct an experiment to verify this claim. For the second problem, we propose an interval semi-supervised approach (ISLDA) where certain predefined sets of keywords (that define the topics researchers are interested in) are restricted to specific intervals of topic assignments. Our experiments show that ISLDA is better for topic extraction than LDA in terms of tf-idf coherence, number of topics identified to predefined keywords and topic stability. We also present a case study on a Russian LiveJournal dataset aimed at ethnicity discourse analysis.

scholarly journals Two-stage topic modelling of scientific publications: A case study of University of Nairobi, Kenya

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. e0243208
Author(s):  
Leacky Muchene ◽  
Wende Safari
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Clustering ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Statistical Tool ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
The University ◽  
Dirichlet Allocation

Unsupervised statistical analysis of unstructured data has gained wide acceptance especially in natural language processing and text mining domains. Topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation is one such statistical tool that has been successfully applied to synthesize collections of legal, biomedical documents and journalistic topics. We applied a novel two-stage topic modelling approach and illustrated the methodology with data from a collection of published abstracts from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. In the first stage, topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation was applied to derive the per-document topic probabilities. To more succinctly present the topics, in the second stage, hierarchical clustering with Hellinger distance was applied to derive the final clusters of topics. The analysis showed that dominant research themes in the university include: HIV and malaria research, research on agricultural and veterinary services as well as cross-cutting themes in humanities and social sciences. Further, the use of hierarchical clustering in the second stage reduces the discovered latent topics to clusters of homogeneous topics.

scholarly journals Categorising patient concerns using natural language processing techniques

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. e100274
Author(s):  
Paul Fairie ◽  
Zilong Zhang ◽  
Adam G D'Souza ◽  
Tara Walsh ◽  
Hude Quan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Community Care ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Text Data ◽  
Emergency Department Care ◽  
Patient Feedback ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Processing Techniques ◽  
Patient Concerns

ObjectivesPatient feedback is critical to identify and resolve patient safety and experience issues in healthcare systems. However, large volumes of unstructured text data can pose problems for manual (human) analysis. This study reports the results of using a semiautomated, computational topic-modelling approach to analyse a corpus of patient feedback.MethodsPatient concerns were received by Alberta Health Services between 2011 and 2018 (n=76 163), regarding 806 care facilities in 163 municipalities, including hospitals, clinics, community care centres and retirement homes, in a province of 4.4 million. Their existing framework requires manual labelling of pre-defined categories. We applied an automated latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic modelling algorithm to identify the topics present in these concerns, and thereby produce a framework-free categorisation.ResultsThe LDA model produced 40 topics which, following manual interpretation by researchers, were reduced to 28 coherent topics. The most frequent topics identified were communication issues causing delays (frequency: 10.58%), community care for elderly patients (8.82%), interactions with nurses (8.80%) and emergency department care (7.52%). Many patient concerns were categorised into multiple topics. Some were more specific versions of categories from the existing framework (eg, communication issues causing delays), while others were novel (eg, smoking in inappropriate settings).DiscussionLDA-generated topics were more nuanced than the manually labelled categories. For example, LDA found that concerns with community care were related to concerns about nursing for seniors, providing opportunities for insight and action.ConclusionOur findings outline the range of concerns patients share in a large health system and demonstrate the usefulness of using LDA to identify categories of patient concerns.

scholarly journals Exploring the Non-Medical impacts of Covid-19 using Natural Language Processing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amol Agade ◽  
Samta Balpande
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Financial Industry ◽  
Distance Map ◽  
The Media ◽  
Non Negative Matrix Factorization

Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic has resulted into massive damage to various platforms of global economy which has caused disruption to human livelihood. Natural Language Processing has been extensively used in different organizations to categorize sentiments, perform recommendation, summarizing information and topic modelling. This research aims to understand the non-medical impact of COVID-19 on global economy by leveraging the natural language processing methodology. This methodology comprises of text classification which includes topic modelling on unstructured COVID-19 media articles dataset provided by Anacode. Like other Natural Language Processing algorithms, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been proposed to classify the media articles dataset in order to analyze COVID-19 pandemic impacts in the different sectors of global economy. Model Accuracy was examined based on the coherence and perplexity score which came out to be 0.51 and -10.90 using LDA algorithm. Both the LDA and NMF algorithm identified similar prevalent topics that was impacted by COVID-19 pandemic in multiple sectors of economy. Through intertopic distance map visualization produced by LDA algorithm, it can be reciprocated that general industries which includes children schooling, parental care, and family gatherings had the major impact followed by business sector and the financial industry.

scholarly journals Attention based automated radiology report generation using CNN and LSTM

PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0262209
Author(s):  
Mehreen Sirshar ◽  
Muhammad Faheem Khalil Paracha ◽  
Muhammad Usman Akram ◽  
Norah Saleh Alghamdi ◽  
Syeda Zainab Yousuf Zaidi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Research Direction ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Report Generation ◽  
Automated Generation ◽  
Hybrid Approaches ◽  
Radiology Reports ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
New Research

The automated generation of radiology reports provides X-rays and has tremendous potential to enhance the clinical diagnosis of diseases in patients. A new research direction is gaining increasing attention that involves the use of hybrid approaches based on natural language processing and computer vision techniques to create auto medical report generation systems. The auto report generator, producing radiology reports, will significantly reduce the burden on doctors and assist them in writing manual reports. Because the sensitivity of chest X-ray (CXR) findings provided by existing techniques not adequately accurate, producing comprehensive explanations for medical photographs remains a difficult task. A novel approach to address this issue was proposed, based on the continuous integration of convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory for detecting diseases, followed by the attention mechanism for sequence generation based on these diseases. Experimental results obtained by using the Indiana University CXR and MIMIC-CXR datasets showed that the proposed model attained the current state-of-the-art efficiency as opposed to other solutions of the baseline. BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, and BLEU-4 were used as the evaluation metrics.

Designing a Chat-Bot for College Information using Information Retrieval and Automatic Text Summarization Techniques

2020 ◽  
Vol 01 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radha Guha
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Text Summarization ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Specific Domain ◽  
User Query ◽  
College Information ◽  
Chat Bot

Background:: In the era of information overload it is very difficult for a human reader to make sense of the vast information available in the internet quickly. Even for a specific domain like college or university website it may be difficult for a user to browse through all the links to get the relevant answers quickly. Objective:: In this scenario, design of a chat-bot which can answer questions related to college information and compare between colleges will be very useful and novel. Methods:: In this paper a novel conversational interface chat-bot application with information retrieval and text summariza-tion skill is designed and implemented. Firstly this chat-bot has a simple dialog skill when it can understand the user query intent, it responds from the stored collection of answers. Secondly for unknown queries, this chat-bot can search the internet and then perform text summarization using advanced techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and text mining (TM). Results:: The advancement of NLP capability of information retrieval and text summarization using machine learning tech-niques of Latent Semantic Analysis(LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Word2Vec, Global Vector (GloVe) and Tex-tRank are reviewed and compared in this paper first before implementing them for the chat-bot design. This chat-bot im-proves user experience tremendously by getting answers to specific queries concisely which takes less time than to read the entire document. Students, parents and faculty can get the answers for variety of information like admission criteria, fees, course offerings, notice board, attendance, grades, placements, faculty profile, research papers and patents etc. more effi-ciently. Conclusion:: The purpose of this paper was to follow the advancement in NLP technologies and implement them in a novel application.

scholarly journals Automated Confirmation of Protein Annotation Using NLP and the UniProtKB Database

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Jin Tao ◽  
Kelly Brayton ◽  
Shira Broschat
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Protein Annotation ◽  
Computing Power ◽  
Journal Publication ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Uniprotkb Database ◽  
Public Repositories ◽  
Annotation Errors

Advances in genome sequencing technology and computing power have brought about the explosive growth of sequenced genomes in public repositories with a concomitant increase in annotation errors. Many protein sequences are annotated using computational analysis rather than experimental verification, leading to inaccuracies in annotation. Confirmation of existing protein annotations is urgently needed before misannotation becomes even more prevalent due to error propagation. In this work we present a novel approach for automatically confirming the existence of manually curated information with experimental evidence of protein annotation. Our ensemble learning method uses a combination of recurrent convolutional neural network, logistic regression, and support vector machine models. Natural language processing in the form of word embeddings is used with journal publication titles retrieved from the UniProtKB database. Importantly, we use recall as our most significant metric to ensure the maximum number of verifications possible; results are reported to a human curator for confirmation. Our ensemble model achieves 91.25% recall, 71.26% accuracy, 65.19% precision, and an F1 score of 76.05% and outperforms the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Text Mining (BioBERT) model with fine-tuning using the same data.

scholarly journals Using NLP in openEHR archetypes retrieval to promote interoperability: a feasibility study in China

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Sun ◽  
Fei Zhang ◽  
Jing Li ◽  
Yicheng Yang ◽  
Xiaolin Diao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Information Sharing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Medical Professional ◽  
Semantic Interoperability ◽  
Medical Information System ◽  
Search Term ◽  
Search Terms ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Test Sets

Abstract Background With the development and application of medical information system, semantic interoperability is essential for accurate and advanced health-related computing and electronic health record (EHR) information sharing. The openEHR approach can improve semantic interoperability. One key improvement of openEHR is that it allows for the use of existing archetypes. The crucial problem is how to improve the precision and resolve ambiguity in the archetype retrieval. Method Based on the query expansion technology and Word2Vec model in Nature Language Processing (NLP), we propose to find synonyms as substitutes for original search terms in archetype retrieval. Test sets in different medical professional level are used to verify the feasibility. Result Applying the approach to each original search term (n = 120) in test sets, a total of 69,348 substitutes were constructed. Precision at 5 (P@5) was improved by 0.767, on average. For the best result, the P@5 was up to 0.975. Conclusions We introduce a novel approach that using NLP technology and corpus to find synonyms as substitutes for original search terms. Compared to simply mapping the element contained in openEHR to an external dictionary, this approach could greatly improve precision and resolve ambiguity in retrieval tasks. This is helpful to promote the application of openEHR and advance EHR information sharing.

scholarly journals News media attention in Climate Action: latent topics and open access

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahereh Dehdarirad ◽  
Kalle Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Open Access ◽  
News Media ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Sustainable Development Goal ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Development Goal ◽  
Climate Action

AbstractIn this study we investigated whether open access could assist the broader dissemination of scientific research in Climate Action (Sustainable Development Goal 13) via news outlets. We did this by comparing (i) the share of open and non-open access documents in different Climate Action topics, and their news counts, and (ii) the mean of news counts for open access and non-open access documents. The data set of this study comprised 70,206 articles and reviews in Sustainable Development Goal 13, published during 2014–2018, retrieved from SciVal. The number of news mentions for each document was obtained from Altmetrics Details Page API using their DOIs, whereas the open access statuses were obtained using Unpaywall.org. The analysis in this paper was done using a combination of (Latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modelling, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis. The covariates included in the regression analysis were features related to authors, country, journal, institution, funding, readability, news source category and topic. Using topic modelling, we identified 10 topics, with topics 4 (meteorology) [21%], 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation) [18%] and 8 (ecosystems and biodiversity) [14%] accounting for 53% of the research in Sustainable Development Goal 13. Additionally, the results of regression analysis showed that while keeping all the variables constant in the model, open access papers in Climate Action had a news count advantage (8.8%) in comparison to non-open access papers. Our findings also showed that while a higher share of open access documents in topics such as topic 9 (Human vulnerability to risks) might not assist with its broader dissemination, in some others such as topic 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation), even a lower share of open access documents might accelerate its broad communication via news outlets.

A guided latent Dirichlet allocation approach to investigate real-time latent topics of Twitter data during Hurricane Laura

2021 ◽  
pp. 016555152110077
Author(s):  
Sulong Zhou ◽  
Pengyu Kan ◽  
Qunying Huang ◽  
Janet Silbernagel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Disaster Response ◽  
Domain Knowledge ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Situational Awareness ◽  
High Performing ◽  
Latent Topics ◽  
Dirichlet Allocation

Natural disasters cause significant damage, casualties and economical losses. Twitter has been used to support prompt disaster response and management because people tend to communicate and spread information on public social media platforms during disaster events. To retrieve real-time situational awareness (SA) information from tweets, the most effective way to mine text is using natural language processing (NLP). Among the advanced NLP models, the supervised approach can classify tweets into different categories to gain insight and leverage useful SA information from social media data. However, high-performing supervised models require domain knowledge to specify categories and involve costly labelling tasks. This research proposes a guided latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) workflow to investigate temporal latent topics from tweets during a recent disaster event, the 2020 Hurricane Laura. With integration of prior knowledge, a coherence model, LDA topics visualisation and validation from official reports, our guided approach reveals that most tweets contain several latent topics during the 10-day period of Hurricane Laura. This result indicates that state-of-the-art supervised models have not fully utilised tweet information because they only assign each tweet a single label. In contrast, our model can not only identify emerging topics during different disaster events but also provides multilabel references to the classification schema. In addition, our results can help to quickly identify and extract SA information to responders, stakeholders and the general public so that they can adopt timely responsive strategies and wisely allocate resource during Hurricane events.

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