• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.131-154
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• 2022

Recently, researches on unstructured data analysis have been actively conducted with the development of information and communication technology. In particular, topic modeling is a representative technique for discovering core topics from massive text data. In the early stages of topic modeling, most studies focused only on topic discovery. As the topic modeling field matured, studies on the change of the topic according to the change of time began to be carried out. Accordingly, interest in dynamic topic modeling that handle changes in keywords constituting the topic is also increasing. Dynamic topic modeling identifies major topics from the data of the initial period and manages the change and flow of topics in a way that utilizes topic information of the previous period to derive further topics in subsequent periods. However, it is very difficult to understand and interpret the results of dynamic topic modeling. The results of traditional dynamic topic modeling simply reveal changes in keywords and their rankings. However, this information is insufficient to represent how the meaning of the topic has changed. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method to visualize topics by period by reflecting the meaning of keywords in each topic. In addition, we propose a method that can intuitively interpret changes in topics and relationships between or among topics. The detailed method of visualizing topics by period is as follows. In the first step, dynamic topic modeling is implemented to derive the top keywords of each period and their weight from text data. In the second step, we derive vectors of top keywords of each topic from the pre-trained word embedding model. Then, we perform dimension reduction for the extracted vectors. Then, we formulate a semantic vector of each topic by calculating weight sum of keywords in each vector using topic weight of each keyword. In the third step, we visualize the semantic vector of each topic using matplotlib, and analyze the relationship between or among the topics based on the visualized result. The change of topic can be interpreted in the following manners. From the result of dynamic topic modeling, we identify rising top 5 keywords and descending top 5 keywords for each period to show the change of the topic. Existing many topic visualization studies usually visualize keywords of each topic, but our approach proposed in this study differs from previous studies in that it attempts to visualize each topic itself. To evaluate the practical applicability of the proposed methodology, we performed an experiment on 1,847 abstracts of artificial intelligence-related papers. The experiment was performed by dividing abstracts of artificial intelligence-related papers into three periods (2016-2017, 2018-2019, 2020-2021). We selected seven topics based on the consistency score, and utilized the pre-trained word embedding model of Word2vec trained with 'Wikipedia', an Internet encyclopedia. Based on the proposed methodology, we generated a semantic vector for each topic. Through this, by reflecting the meaning of keywords, we visualized and interpreted the themes by period. Through these experiments, we confirmed that the rising and descending of the topic weight of a keyword can be usefully used to interpret the semantic change of the corresponding topic and to grasp the relationship among topics. In this study, to overcome the limitations of dynamic topic modeling results, we used word embedding and dimension reduction techniques to visualize topics by era. The results of this study are meaningful in that they broadened the scope of topic understanding through the visualization of dynamic topic modeling results. In addition, the academic contribution can be acknowledged in that it laid the foundation for follow-up studies using various word embeddings and dimensionality reduction techniques to improve the performance of the proposed methodology.