Network-based Topic Structure Visualization

In the real world, many topics are inter-correlated, making it challenging to investigate their structure and relationships. Understanding the interplay between topics and their relevance can provide valuable insights for researchers, guiding their studies and informing the direction of research. In this paper, we utilize the topic-words distribution, obtained from topic models, as item-response data to model the structure of topics using a latent space item response model. By estimating the latent positions of topics based on their distances toward words, we can capture the underlying topic structure and reveal their relationships. Visualizing the latent positions of topics in Euclidean space allows for an intuitive understanding of their proximity and associations. We interpret relationships among topics by characterizing each topic based on representative words selected using a newly proposed scoring scheme. Additionally, we assess the maturity of topics by tracking their latent positions using different word sets, providing insights into the robustness of topics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we analyze the topic composition of COVID-19 studies during the early stage of its emergence using biomedical literature in the PubMed database. The software and data used in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/jeon9677/gViz .

Graph-based Trajectory Visualization for Text Mining of COVID-19 Biomedical Literature

Since the emergence of the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, relevant research has been published at a dazzling pace, which makes it hard to follow the research in this area without dedicated efforts. It is practically impossible to implement this task manually due to the high volume of the relevant literature. Text mining has been considered to be a powerful approach to address this challenge, especially the topic modeling, a well-known unsupervised method that aims to reveal latent topics from the literature. However, in spite of its potential utility, the results generated from this approach are often investigated manually. Hence, its application to the COVID-19 literature is not straightforward and expert knowledge is needed to make meaningful interpretations. In order to address these challenges, we propose a novel analytical framework for effective visualization and mining of topic modeling results. Here we assumed that topics constituting a paper can be positioned on an interaction map, which belongs to a high-dimensional Euclidean space. Based on this assumption, after summarizing topics with their topic-word distributions using the biterm topic model, we mapped these latent topics on networks to visualize relationships among the topics. Moreover, in the proposed approach, the change of relationships among topics can be traced using a trajectory plot generated with different levels of word richness. These results together provide a deeply mined and intuitive representation of relationships among topics related to a specific research area. The application of this proposed framework to the PubMed literature shows that our approach facilitates understanding of the topics constituting the COVID-19 knowledge.