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Textual data are increasingly common in test data as many assessments include constructed response (CR) items as indicators of participants' understanding. The development of techniques based on natural language processing has made it possible for researchers to rapidly analyse large sets of textual data. One family of statistical techniques for this purpose are probabilistic topic models. Topic modelling is a technique for detecting the latent topic structure in a collection of documents and has been widely used to analyse texts in a variety of areas. The detected topics can reveal primary themes in the documents, and the relative use of topics can be useful in investigating the variability of the documents. Supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (SLDA) is a popular topic model in that family that jointly models textual data and paired responses such as could occur with participants' textual answers to CR items and their rubric-based scores. SLDA has an assumption of a homogeneous relationship between textual data and paired responses across all documents. This approach, while useful for some purposes, may not be satisfied for situations in which a population has subgroups that have different relationships. In this study, we introduce a new supervised topic model that incorporates finite-mixture modelling into the SLDA. This new model can detect latent groups of participants that have different relationships between their textual responses and associated scores. The model is illustrated with an example from an analysis of a set of textual responses and paired scores from a middle grades assessment of science inquiry knowledge. A simulation study is presented to investigate the performance of the proposed model under practical testing conditions., (© 2023 The Authors. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.)

Background: Falls in older people are common and morbid. Prediction models can help identifying individuals at higher fall risk. Electronic health records (EHR) offer an opportunity to develop automated prediction tools that may help to identify fall-prone individuals and lower clinical workload. However, existing models primarily utilise structured EHR data and neglect information in unstructured data. Using machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), we aimed to examine the predictive performance provided by unstructured clinical notes, and their incremental performance over structured data to predict falls., Methods: We used primary care EHR data of people aged 65 or over. We developed three logistic regression models using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator: one using structured clinical variables (Baseline), one with topics extracted from unstructured clinical notes (Topic-based) and one by adding clinical variables to the extracted topics (Combi). Model performance was assessed in terms of discrimination using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), and calibration by calibration plots. We used 10-fold cross-validation to validate the approach., Results: Data of 35,357 individuals were analysed, of which 4,734 experienced falls. Our NLP topic modelling technique discovered 151 topics from the unstructured clinical notes. AUCs and 95% confidence intervals of the Baseline, Topic-based and Combi models were 0.709 (0.700-0.719), 0.685 (0.676-0.694) and 0.718 (0.708-0.727), respectively. All the models showed good calibration., Conclusions: Unstructured clinical notes are an additional viable data source to develop and improve prediction models for falls compared to traditional prediction models, but the clinical relevance remains limited., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Geriatrics Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Climate change is a paramount problem for humanity, representing a substantial danger to all living organisms. Industrialization, a vital factor for economic progress, has resulted in global warming, posing a threat to the long-term viability of our ecosystem. Currently, a wide range of techniques and technologies are being used to guarantee the preservation of the environment for future generations. This study employed data from the Scopus database to do topic modeling. Authors used latent Dirichlet allocation to extract research themes related to environmental sustainability from a corpus of 4023 research articles published between 1976 and 2022. By utilizing clustering methodologies to analyze the collection of words, Authors successfully forecasted two, five, and ten study subjects, emphasizing specific domains that necessitate additional investigation by scholars. Based on coherence ratings, five subjects have been identified as prospective study areas requiring further scientific exploration. The results of our research emphasize the significance of incorporating environmentally-friendly technologies in different industries to promote a long-lasting and eco-friendly ecosystem. In addition, authors recommend prioritizing implementing sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies, improving the management of ecosystems, encouraging water conservation, promoting agricultural advancements, and advancing renewable energy resources as crucial strategies for protecting the environment and enhancing ecological conditions. This analysis illuminates current research trends in environmental sustainability and potential pathways for future investigation and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Current outcome measures in digital mental health lack granularity, especially for single‐session interventions. This study aimed to address this by utilising natural language processing (NLP) methods to create a clear and relevant outcome measure. This paper describes the development of the Adult Session Wants and Needs Outcome Measure (Adult SWAN‐OM), a novel outcome measure for the Qwell digital mental healthcare platform to understand service user (SU) needs engaging in single‐session therapy (SST). Methods: The research employs a multi‐phased approach combining NLP methods with the typical stages of outcome measures development as follows: (1) assumption definition and validation with SUs and clinicians; (2) transcript theme extraction using the RoBERTa large language model (LLM) in conjunction with topic modelling to extract themes from 254 single‐session transcripts from 192 SUs; (3) clinical item refinement focus group; (4) content validity with clinicians and SUs to improve the relevance and clarity of the items; and (5) outcome measure finalisation in a workshop held with clinicians to consolidate the final wording. Results: Ninety‐six potential wants and needs were generated and distilled into 12 measure items. The outcome measure was shown to be relevant and clear to both SUs and clinicians when used in the context of SST. Conclusion: This study highlights the potential of combining NLP approaches with co‐creation methods in single‐session outcome measure development. We argue that the incorporation of clinical expertise and SU experience ensures the clarity and applicability of such measures and that this approach to capturing single‐session wants and needs promises novel insights for supporting digital mental health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the printed and online newspaper media in the UK, notions of 'decolonisation' referring to various contexts, such as historical, relating to museums and institutions, cultural decolonisation and in relation to modern independence discussions, can be traced. In this article, we have applied topic modelling and natural language processing methods to carry out a classification of, and sentiment analysis on, newspaper headlines and texts from leading British newspapers covering decolonisation over the past decade. The results show an abrupt change in the meaning of decolonisation starting in the middle of the 2010s with an increased focus on cultural and institutional matters, particularly in right-leaning media. Surprisingly, the editorial slant of broadsheets seemingly only had at best moderate effects on tone, while headlines in right-wing tabloids were significantly more negative. Articles covering cultural aspects of decolonisation were substantially more negative than those applying a more traditional, territorial definition of decolonisation. Given the influence of newspaper media on public and private opinions, we discuss the heritage implications of these findings and suggest avenues for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Climate change is a paramount problem for humanity, representing a substantial danger to all living organisms. Industrialization, a vital factor for economic progress, has resulted in global warming, posing a threat to the long-term viability of our ecosystem. Currently, a wide range of techniques and technologies are being used to guarantee the preservation of the environment for future generations. This study employed data from the Scopus database to do topic modeling. Authors used latent Dirichlet allocation to extract research themes related to environmental sustainability from a corpus of 4023 research articles published between 1976 and 2022. By utilizing clustering methodologies to analyze the collection of words, Authors successfully forecasted two, five, and ten study subjects, emphasizing specific domains that necessitate additional investigation by scholars. Based on coherence ratings, five subjects have been identified as prospective study areas requiring further scientific exploration. The results of our research emphasize the significance of incorporating environmentally-friendly technologies in different industries to promote a long-lasting and eco-friendly ecosystem. In addition, authors recommend prioritizing implementing sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies, improving the management of ecosystems, encouraging water conservation, promoting agricultural advancements, and advancing renewable energy resources as crucial strategies for protecting the environment and enhancing ecological conditions. This analysis illuminates current research trends in environmental sustainability and potential pathways for future investigation and intervention.

Using machine learning, we examined customers’ opinions about the metaverse in the hospitality industry (encompassing hotels, restaurant, gaming, virtual events, tours and travel). A total of 8,855 tweets were collected from Twitter (now called X), and machine learning algorithms such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling were performed using Python libraries to capture the important topics related to metaverse applications. Nearly two thirds of the collected tweets (60.9%) contained a mostly positive general sentiment toward the use of the metaverse. Six important topics emerged from the topic modeling: gaming, virtual events, virtual sightseeing, travel, business and blockchain. Despite numerous studies on the proper integration of the metaverse, VR and AR, to the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies conducted to determine the customer experience of the metaverse in the hospitality industry using social media data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the changing dynamics of tourism in Antarctica, focusing on the impact of digitalisation and User-Generated Content on platforms like Tripadvisor. It aims to understand how online reviews influence perceptions and decisions to visit Antarctica, a region known for its pristine environment and status as 'the last frontier'. Utilising Environmental Perception and Behaviour Geography (EPBG) principles, this research conducts a quantitative analysis of reviews from potential and current travellers. Through text mining, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), it investigates the emotional and perceptual discourse surrounding Antarctic tourism and its alignment with Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals. The findings reveal a detailed narrative of sustainability challenges and the emotional geography related to tourism in Antarctica, highlighting emotions such as happiness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness among visitors. This study uncovers differences in perception based on visitors' backgrounds, noting that individuals from nature-focused cities display strong environmental concerns, whereas those from advanced urban centres show a more positive attitude. This research contributes to the understanding of EPBG, text mining, and NLP, offering insights into sustainable tourism practices in Antarctica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Document clustering and topic modelling methods are useful in determining groups of semantically similar documents. In literature, various studies have been conducted to evaluate the performance of lexical and semantic features on a clustering task. However, the focus of such studies was on the English language which is considered a high resource language. This paper analyses the effect of various feature extraction techniques combined with clustering and topic modelling algorithms on grouping news headlines written in Urdu, a low-resource language. Various features were first extracted using different approaches such as term-frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), word embeddings learned using Word2vec and fastText models, deep contextualised word embeddings from BERT, and document embeddings extracted from the Doc2Vec model. Three different clustering algorithms: K-Means, Affinity Propagation and Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) were then used to produce clusters for a given set of news headlines. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model was also assessed for comparison with clustering algorithms. The evaluation based on extrinsic measures revealed that higher-quality clusters were produced when the K-Means algorithm was applied on a frequent unigrams-based TF-IDF feature matrix. In addition, several word embedding models have been trained on the domain of Urdu News headlines using state-of-the-art techniques such as Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, and fastText. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topic modelling is a text mining technique for identifying salient themes from a number of documents. The output is commonly a set of topics consisting of isolated tokens that often co-occur in such documents. Manual effort is often associated with interpreting a topic's description from such tokens. However, from a human's perspective, such outputs may not adequately provide enough information to infer the meaning of the topics; thus, their interpretability is often inaccurately understood. Although several studies have attempted to automatically extend topic descriptions as a means of enhancing the interpretation of topic models, they rely on external language sources that may become unavailable, must be kept up to date to generate relevant results, and present privacy issues when training on or processing data. This paper presents a novel approach towards extending the output of traditional topic modelling methods beyond a list of isolated tokens. This approach removes the dependence on external sources by using the textual data themselves by extracting high-scoring keywords and mapping them to the topic model's token outputs. To compare how the proposed method benchmarks against the state of the art, a comparative analysis against results produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) is presented. Such results report that the proposed method resonates with the thematic coverage found in LLMs and often surpasses such models by bridging the gap between broad thematic elements and granular details. In addition, to demonstrate and reinforce the generalisation of the proposed method, the approach was further evaluated using two other topic modelling methods as the underlying models and when using a heterogeneous unseen dataset. To measure the interpretability of the proposed outputs against those of the traditional topic modelling approach, independent annotators manually scored each output based on their quality and usefulness as well as the efficiency of the annotation task. The proposed approach demonstrated higher quality and usefulness, as well as higher efficiency in the annotation task, in comparison to the outputs of a traditional topic modelling method, demonstrating an increase in their interpretability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests a Value Proposition (VP) framework that enables analysis of the beneficial impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources and capabilities on specific VP activities. To develop such a framework, we examined existing business and management research publications to identify and extract assertions that could be used as a source of actionable insights for early-stage growth-oriented companies. The extracted assertions were assembled into a corpus of texts that was subjected to topic modelling analysis—a machine learning approach to natural language processing that is used to identify latent themes in large corpora of text documents. The topic modelling resulted in the identification of seven topics. Each topic is defined by a set of most frequent words co-occurring in a distinctive subset of texts that could be interpreted in terms of activities constituting the core elements of the VP framework. We then examined each activity in terms of its potential to be enhanced by employing AI resources and capabilities. The interpretation of the topic modelling results led to the identification of seven topics: (1) Value created; (2) Stakeholder value propositions; (3) Foreign market entry; (4) Customer base; (5) Continuous improvement; (6) Cross-border operations; and (7) Company image. The uniqueness of the adopted topic modelling approach consists in the quality of the assertions and the interpretation of the seven topics as an activity framework, i.e., in its capacity to generate actionable insights for practitioners. The additional analysis suggests that there is a potential for AI to enhance the emerging four core elements of the VP framework: Value created, Stakeholder value propositions, Foreign market entry, and Customer base. More importantly, we found that the greatest number of assertions related to activities that could be enhanced by AI are part of the Customer base topic, i.e., the topic that is most directly related to the growth potential of the companies. In addition, the VP framework suggests that a company's customer base growth is continuously enhanced through a positive loop enabled by activities focused on the Continuous improvement of the activities and the amount of Value created, the alignment of Stakeholder value propositions, and companies' Foreign market entry. Thus, the multiple-stakeholder perspective on VP development and foreign market entry appears as a factor that helps in understanding the beneficial impact of AI on the enhancement of the VP of early-stage growth-oriented companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content-based (CB) recommendation algorithms recommend items to a user based on items the user liked in the past. CB methodologies have gained attention due to their higher accuracy and transparency and the emergence of new technologies, such as knowledge graphs (KGs), advances in natural language processing (NLP), and sentiment analysis. While most previous studies have mainly focussed on the use of term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and other related enhancements, little work can be found on using KGs in CB recommendations. This paper presents an enhancement of the conventional CB recommendation by incorporating KGs for a movie domain. The graph is constructed using the MovieLens data set, which is augmented with additional features such as actors, directors, and genres. Furthermore, the graph is expanded by incorporating topics derived from latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) extraction. Using the KGs, the proposed approach enhances user profiles by leveraging the interconnected user-movie relationship within a graph structure. The results of the experiments showed that the proposed approach exceeded the tested baselines in terms of precision, recall, and F-score metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topic modelling is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that has gained popularity in the recent past. It identifies word co-occurrence patterns inside a document corpus to reveal hidden topics. Graph Neural Topic Model (GNTM) is a topic modelling technique that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn document representations effectively. It provides high-precision documents-topics and topics-words probability distributions. Such models find immense application in many sectors, including healthcare, financial services, and safety-critical systems like autonomous cars. This model is not explainable. As a matter of fact, the user cannot comprehend the underlying decision-making process. The paper introduces a technique to explain the documents-topics probability distributions output of GNTM. The explanation is achieved by building a local explainable model such as a probabilistic Naïve Bayes classifier. The experimental results using various benchmark NLP datasets show a fidelity of 88.39% between the predictions of GNTM and the local explainable model. This similarity implies that the proposed technique can effectively explain the documents-topics probability distribution output of GNTM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we employed ChatGPT, an advanced large language model, to analyze hotel reviews, focusing on aspect-based feedback to understand service failures in the hospitality industry. The shift from traditional feedback analysis methods to natural language processing (NLP) was initially hindered by the complexity and ambiguity of hotel review texts. However, the emergence of ChatGPT marks a significant breakthrough, offering enhanced accuracy and context-aware analysis. This study presents a novel approach to analyzing aspect-based hotel complaint reviews using ChatGPT. Employing a dataset from TripAdvisor, we methodically identified ten hotel attributes, establishing aspect–summarization pairs for each. Customized prompts facilitated ChatGPT's efficient review summarization, emphasizing explicit keyword extraction for detailed analysis. A qualitative evaluation of ChatGPT's outputs demonstrates its effectiveness in succinctly capturing crucial information, particularly through the explicitation of key terms relevant to each attribute. This study further delves into topic distributions across various hotel market segments (budget, midrange, and luxury), using explicit keyword analysis for the topic modeling of each hotel attribute. This comprehensive approach using ChatGPT for aspect-based summarization demonstrates a significant advancement in the way hotel reviews can be analyzed, offering deeper insights into customer experiences and perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Topic modelling is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that has gained popularity in the recent past. It identifies word co-occurrence patterns inside a document corpus to reveal hidden topics. Graph Neural Topic Model (GNTM) is a topic modelling technique that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn document representations effectively. It provides high-precision documents-topics and topics-words probability distributions. Such models find immense application in many sectors, including healthcare, financial services, and safety-critical systems like autonomous cars. This model is not explainable. As a matter of fact, the user cannot comprehend the underlying decision-making process. The paper introduces a technique to explain the documents-topics probability distributions output of GNTM. The explanation is achieved by building a local explainable model such as a probabilistic Naïve Bayes classifier. The experimental results using various benchmark NLP datasets show a fidelity of 88.39% between the predictions of GNTM and the local explainable model. This similarity implies that the proposed technique can effectively explain the documents-topics probability distribution output of GNTM.

The author's motivation for this study is to create a new application of big data to food. While the amount of food data increases, many important topics have been studied within separate fields or too narrow disciplines, due to the interdisciplinary nature of this type of data. The author is of the opinion that these drawbacks can be eliminated by analysing food big data using computing methods and by taking interdisciplinary approach to develop research questions. The fact that computer science has a significant role in the analysis of food consumption data is evidenced by the development of a new field of science--food computing, which is the framework of this study. Since there are still many unresolved tasks in the collection and analysis of foodrelated data, the use of social media and other type of big data is an important introduction. The author, by combining the methodological frameworks of cognitive, social and computer sciences, has developed several methods for using big data, based on the natural language processing and by applying the following methodologies: a) sentiment analysis of affective reactions about food and multi-sensory eating experience; b) comparative analysis of different national cuisines, by applying the topic modelling methodology; and c) bigram analysis to trace ways how food consumers talk about healthy food. Results have been summarised in a new conceptual framework by illustrating its application in practice; in the course of application, several researches, have been conducted using various computer science methodologies. As a combination of theories and methodologies of social, cognitive, and computer sciences, the new conceptual framework offers methods and a direction for studying food consumers. By using computer science methods in the analysis of big data and thus improving the understanding of food consumption, the author hopes to improve the efficiency of public health policies resulting in better public health and higher quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionAntibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii is a very important nosocomial pathogen worldwide. Thousands of studies have been conducted about this pathogen. However, there has not been any attempt to use all this information to highlight the research trends concerning this pathogen.MethodsHere we use unsupervised learning and natural language processing (NLP), two areas of Artificial Intelligence, to analyse the most extensive database of articles created (5,500+ articles, from 851 different journals, published over 3 decades).ResultsK-means clustering found 113 theme clusters and these were defined with representative terms automatically obtained with topic modelling, summarising different research areas. The biggest clusters, all with over 100 articles, are biased toward multidrug resistance, carbapenem resistance, clinical treatment, and nosocomial infections. However, we also found that some research areas, such as ecology and non-human infections, have received very little attention. This approach allowed us to study research themes over time unveiling those of recent interest, such as the use of Cefiderocol (a recently approved antibiotic) against A. baumannii.DiscussionIn a broader context, our results show that unsupervised learning, NLP and topic modelling can be used to describe and analyse the research themes for important infectious diseases. This strategy should be very useful to analyse other ESKAPE pathogens or any other pathogens relevant to Public Health.

Topic modelling has become a highly popular technique for extracting knowledge from texts. It encompasses various method families, including Factorial methods, Probabilistic methods, and Natural Language Processing methods. This paper introduces a unified conceptual framework for Factorial and Probabilistic methods by identifying shared elements and representing them using a homogeneous notation. The paper presents 12 different methods within this framework, enabling easy comparative analysis to assess the flexibility and how realistic the assumptions of each approach are. This establishes the initial stage of a broader analysis aimed at relating all method families to this common framework, comprehensively understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and establishing general application guidelines. Also, an experimental setup reinforces the convenience of having harmonized notational schema. The paper concludes with a discussion on the presented methods and outlines future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose the Recurrent Embedded Topic Model (RETM) which is a modification of the Embedded Topic Modelling (ETM) by reusing the Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) that the model had implemented and applying it to a recurrent neural network (LSTM), using the order of the words of the text, in the CBOW space as the recurrency of the LSTM, while calculating the topic–document distribution of the model. This approach is novel because the ETM and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) do not use the order of the words while calculating the topic proportions for each text, making worse predictions in the end. The RETM is a topic-modelling technique that vastly improves (by more than 15 times in train data and between 10% and 90% better based on test dataset values for perplexity) the quality of the topics that were calculated for the datasets used in this paper. This model is explained in detail throughout the paper and presents results on different use cases on how the model performs against ETM and LDA. The RETM can be used with better accuracy for any topic model-related problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well recognized that ISIS have effectively utilized several channels to disseminate their propaganda. Producing a considerable amount of unstructured data, the Al-Hayat Media Centre had a cornerstone role in the implementation of the propaganda which targeted audiences of the Western world. Although there was a considerable effort by researchers to analyse the ISIS's online propaganda, there are very few studies which try to relate the above-mentioned material with the emotions associated with it. In this paper, we study the influence of all known issues of the Islamic State magazines, published by the Al-Hayat Media Centre, used to disseminate propaganda, and introduced ideas to audiences outside Iraq and Syria. We perform a series of natural language processing techniques, such as Emotion and Polarity Analysis using a lexicon-based approach and topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We extract deep insights from the terrorist corpus, including the emotions that are dominant in the text, the combination of emotions (patterns) that the magazine authors attempt to evoke to the reader, the main topics of discussions and the overall 'feel' and theming of the propaganda. The combination of lexicon-based emotion analysis with the topic modelling further achieves a reduction in the 'emotion noise' that can be observed when applying the lexicon-based approach only, making clear which the dominant emotions are. The valuable findings discussed in this paper contribute to the existing Information Warfare literature as they provide a whole new perspective in the subject of ISIS's propaganda. The method also aims to open an interdisciplinary discussion, with applications in politics, marketing, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food waste is a complex issue requiring novel approaches to understand and identify areas that could be leveraged for food waste reduction. Data science techniques such as sentiment analysis, emotion analysis, and topic modelling could be used to explore big-picture themes of food waste discussions. This paper aimed to examine food waste discussions on Twitter and identify priority areas for future food waste communication campaigns and interventions. Australian tweets containing food-waste-related search terms were extracted from the Twitter Application Programming Interface from 2019–2021 and analysed using sentiment and emotion engines. Topic modelling was conducted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Engagement was calculated as the sum of likes, retweets, replies, and quotes. There were 39,449 tweets collected over three years. Tweets were mostly negative in sentiment and angry in emotion. The topic model identified 13 key topics such as eating to save food waste, morals, economics, and packaging. Engagement was higher for tweets with polarising sentiments and negative emotions. Overall, our interdisciplinary analysis highlighted the negative discourse surrounding food waste discussions and identified priority areas for food waste communication. Data science techniques should be used in the future to monitor public perceptions and understand priority areas for food waste reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which population factors have predisposed people to disregard government safety guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic and what justifications do they give for this non-compliance? To address these questions, we analyse fixed-choice and free-text responses to survey questions about compliance and government handling of the pandemic, collected from tens of thousands of members of the UK public at three 6-monthly timepoints. We report that sceptical opinions about the government and mainstream-media narrative, especially as pertaining to justification for guidelines, significantly predict non-compliance. However, free text topic modelling shows that such opinions are diverse, spanning from scepticism about government competence and self-interest to full-blown conspiracy theories, and covary in prevalence with sociodemographic variables. These results indicate that attempts to counter non-compliance through argument should account for this diversity in peoples' underlying opinions, and inform conversations aimed at bridging the gap between the general public and bodies of authority accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in magazines content aimed specifically at women or men are a means to create and reproduce gender stereotypes. Novel computational tools allow to study differences in magazines content taking into account all available articles. In this study, we analyse the case of two Argentinian magazines published by the same publishing house over a decade (2008–2018), advertised by the publishing house as targeting women and men respectively. Using computational tools, we are able to analyse more than 24,000 articles, which would have been an impossible task using manual content analysis methodologies. With Topic Modelling techniques we identify the main themes discussed in the magazines and quantify their different frequency between magazines over time. Then, we performed a word-frequency analysis to validate this methodology and extend the analysis to other subjects. Our results show that topics such as Family, Business and Women as sex objects present an initial bias that tends to disappear over time. Conversely, in Fashion and Science topics, the initial differences are maintained. Also, we identify a considerable increase in the use of words associated with feminism since 2015 and specifically the word abortion in 2018. Furthermore, we develop a website where everyone can perform additional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topic modelling is a text mining technique for identifying salient themes from a number of documents. The output is commonly a set of topics consisting of isolated tokens that often co-occur in such documents. Manual effort is often associated with interpreting a topic’s description from such tokens. However, from a human’s perspective, such outputs may not adequately provide enough information to infer the meaning of the topics; thus, their interpretability is often inaccurately understood. Although several studies have attempted to automatically extend topic descriptions as a means of enhancing the interpretation of topic models, they rely on external language sources that may become unavailable, must be kept up to date to generate relevant results, and present privacy issues when training on or processing data. This paper presents a novel approach towards extending the output of traditional topic modelling methods beyond a list of isolated tokens. This approach removes the dependence on external sources by using the textual data themselves by extracting high-scoring keywords and mapping them to the topic model’s token outputs. To compare how the proposed method benchmarks against the state of the art, a comparative analysis against results produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) is presented. Such results report that the proposed method resonates with the thematic coverage found in LLMs and often surpasses such models by bridging the gap between broad thematic elements and granular details. In addition, to demonstrate and reinforce the generalisation of the proposed method, the approach was further evaluated using two other topic modelling methods as the underlying models and when using a heterogeneous unseen dataset. To measure the interpretability of the proposed outputs against those of the traditional topic modelling approach, independent annotators manually scored each output based on their quality and usefulness as well as the efficiency of the annotation task. The proposed approach demonstrated higher quality and usefulness, as well as higher efficiency in the annotation task, in comparison to the outputs of a traditional topic modelling method, demonstrating an increase in their interpretability.

The article suggests a Value Proposition (VP) framework that enables analysis of the beneficial impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources and capabilities on specific VP activities. To develop such a framework, we examined existing business and management research publications to identify and extract assertions that could be used as a source of actionable insights for early-stage growth-oriented companies. The extracted assertions were assembled into a corpus of texts that was subjected to topic modelling analysis—a machine learning approach to natural language processing that is used to identify latent themes in large corpora of text documents. The topic modelling resulted in the identification of seven topics. Each topic is defined by a set of most frequent words co-occurring in a distinctive subset of texts that could be interpreted in terms of activities constituting the core elements of the VP framework. We then examined each activity in terms of its potential to be enhanced by employing AI resources and capabilities. The interpretation of the topic modelling results led to the identification of seven topics: (1) Value created; (2) Stakeholder value propositions; (3) Foreign market entry; (4) Customer base; (5) Continuous improvement; (6) Cross-border operations; and (7) Company image. The uniqueness of the adopted topic modelling approach consists in the quality of the assertions and the interpretation of the seven topics as an activity framework, i.e., in its capacity to generate actionable insights for practitioners. The additional analysis suggests that there is a potential for AI to enhance the emerging four core elements of the VP framework: Value created, Stakeholder value propositions, Foreign market entry, and Customer base. More importantly, we found that the greatest number of assertions related to activities that could be enhanced by AI are part of the Customer base topic, i.e., the topic that is most directly related to the growth potential of the companies. In addition, the VP framework suggests that a company’s customer base growth is continuously enhanced through a positive loop enabled by activities focused on the Continuous improvement of the activities and the amount of Value created, the alignment of Stakeholder value propositions, and companies’ Foreign market entry. Thus, the multiple-stakeholder perspective on VP development and foreign market entry appears as a factor that helps in understanding the beneficial impact of AI on the enhancement of the VP of early-stage growth-oriented companies.

The way we communicate has been revolutionised by the widespread use of social networks. Any kind of online message can reach anyone in the world almost instantly. The speed with which information spreads is undoubtedly the strength of social networks, but at the same time, any user of these platforms can see how toxic messages spread in parallel with likes, comments and ratings about any person or entity. In such cases, the victim feels even more helpless and defenceless as a result of the rapid spread. For this reason, we have implemented an automatic detector of toxic messages on social media. This allows us to stop toxicity in its tracks and protect victims. In particular, the aim of the survey is to demonstrate how traditional Machine Learning methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) work on equal terms with Deep Learning methods represented by a Transformer architecture and characterised by a higher computational cost. In particular, the paper describes the results obtained by testing different supervised Machine Learning classifiers (Logistic Regression, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine) combined with two topic-modelling techniques of NLP, (Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation). A pre-trained Transformer named BERTweet was also tested. All models performed well in this task, so much so that values close to or above 90% were achieved in terms of the F1 score evaluation metric. The best result achieved by Transformer BERTweet, 91.40%, was therefore not impressive in this context, as the performance gains are too small compared to the computational overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisit intention is a key indicator of business performance, studied in many fields including hospitality. This work employs big data analytics to investigate revisit intention patterns from tourists' electronic word of mouth (eWOM) using text classification, negation detection, and topic modelling. The method is applied on publicly available hotel reviews that are labelled automatically based on consumers' intention to revisit a hotel or not. Topics discussed in revisit-annotated reviews are automatically extracted and used as features during the training of two Extreme Gradient Boosting models (XGBoost), one for each of two hotel categories (2/3 and 4/5 stars). The emerging patterns from the trained XGBoost models are identified using an explainable machine learning technique, namely SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Results show how topics discussed by tourists in reviews relate with revisit/non revisit intention. The proposed method can help hoteliers make more informed decisions on how to improve their services and thus increase customer revisit occurrences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There is a paucity of research examining patient experiences of cochlear implants. We sought to use natural language processing methods to explore patient experiences and concerns in the online cochlear implant (CI) community. Materials and Methods: Cross‐sectional study of posts on the online Reddit r/CochlearImplants forum from 1 March 2015 to 11 November 2021. Natural language processing using the BERTopic automated topic modelling technique was employed to cluster posts into semantically similar topics. Topic categorisation was manually validated by two independent reviewers and Cohen's kappa calculated to determine inter‐rater reliability between machine vs human and human vs human categorisation. Results: We retrieved 987 posts from 588 unique Reddit users on the r/CochlearImplants forum. Posts were initially categorised by BERTopic into 16 different Topics, which were increased to 23 Topics following manual inspection. The most popular topics related to CI connectivity (n = 112), adults considering getting a CI (n = 107), surgery‐related posts (n = 89) and day‐to‐day living with a CI (n = 85). Cohen's kappa among all posts was 0.62 (machine vs. human) and 0.72 (human vs. human), and among categorised posts was 0.85 (machine vs. human) and 0.84 (human vs. human). Conclusions: This cross‐sectional study of social media discussions among the online cochlear implant community identified common attitudes, experiences and concerns of patients living with, or seeking, a cochlear implant. Our validation of natural language processing methods to categorise topics shows that automated analysis of similar Otolaryngology‐related content is a viable and accurate alternative to manual qualitative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interests play an essential role in the process of learning, thereby enriching learners 'interests will yield to an enhanced experience in MOOCs. Learners interact freely and spontaneously on social media through different forms of user-generated content which contain hidden information that reveals their real interests and preferences. In this paper, we aim to identify and extract the topical interest from the text content shared by learners on social media to enrich their course preferences in MOOCs. We apply NLP pipeline and topic modeling techniques to the textual feature using three well-known topic models: Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Latent Semantic Analysis, and BERTopic. The results of our experimentation have shown that BERTopic performed better on the scrapped dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synergies between fleet management enterprise systems and traffic control systems for information sharing and collaborative planning can contribute to significant improvements to operational efficiency, safety and environmental impact. This paper provides a synthesis of the extant body of research on synergies between fleet management and traffic control systems identifying five key topics in prior research and suggesting research directions. The findings are based on a systematic literature review and topic modelling with the use of natural language processing (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). The five topics identified are related to: hazardous goods transportation, environment and emissions, position tracking and navigation technologies, traffic management and fleet operations´ optimization. The two most frequent topics link to social responsibility (minimizing accidents during hazardous goods transportation and minimizing environmental impact) indicating the relevance of this area of research to sustainability. Despite the strong potential for synergies between intelligent transportation systems and enterprise fleet management systems, the review identified a paucity of research on the coordination between real-time fleet management and traffic control measures (e.g. ramp metering, route guidance, variable speed limits and signal control). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergovernmental deliberations in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) are typically considered the realm of sovereign nation states. We challenge this position by studying the role of the UN Secretariat in UNSC debates, focusing on the debates on Afghanistan (1995–2017). We combine natural language processing with a network theoretical perspective to observe speaker position, topic introduction, and topic evolution and we complement this analysis with an illustrative case study. The quantitative analysis shows that UN officials take an overall impartial position but that they do, at times, introduce and promote their own topics putting them in the position to shape the debate. The qualitative case study selects one 'bureaucratic topic' to confirm bureaucratic agency. Combined, our methods allow to study the role of speakers in a debate and show that the UN bureaucracy acted as an autonomous speechmaker even in a venue were bureaucratic agency seems unlikely – the UNSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which population factors have predisposed people to disregard government safety guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic and what justifications do they give for this non-compliance? To address these questions, we analyse fixed-choice and free-text responses to survey questions about compliance and government handling of the pandemic, collected from tens of thousands of members of the UK public at three 6-monthly timepoints. We report that sceptical opinions about the government and mainstream-media narrative, especially as pertaining to justification for guidelines, significantly predict non-compliance. However, free text topic modelling shows that such opinions are diverse, spanning from scepticism about government competence and self-interest to full-blown conspiracy theories, and covary in prevalence with sociodemographic variables. These results indicate that attempts to counter non-compliance through argument should account for this diversity in peoples’ underlying opinions, and inform conversations aimed at bridging the gap between the general public and bodies of authority accordingly.

Social media offers users an online platform to freely express themselves; however, when users post opinionated and offensive comments that target certain individuals or communities, this could instigate animosity towards them. Widespread condemnation of obesity (fatness) has led to much fat stigmatizing content being posted online. A methodological framework that uses a novel mixed-method approach for unearthing hate speech patterns from large textbased corpora gathered from social media is proposed. We explain the use of computermediated quantitative methods comprising natural language processing techniques such as sentiment analysis, emotion analysis and topic modelling, along with qualitative discourse analysis. Next, we have applied the framework to a corpus of texts on gendered and weightbased data that have been extracted from Twitter and Reddit. This assisted in the detection of different emotions being expressed, the composition of word frequency patterns and the broader fat-based themes underpinning the hateful content posted online. The framework has provided a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative methods that draw on social science and data mining techniques to build real-world knowledge in hate speech detection. Current information systems research is limited in its use of mixed analytic approaches for studying hate speech in social media. Our study therefore contributes to future research by establishing a roadmap for conducting mixed-method analyses for better comprehension and understanding of hate speech patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of 2019, while the world was being hit by the COVID-19 virus and, consequently, was living a global health crisis, many other pandemics were putting humankind in danger. The role of social media is of paramount importance in these kinds of contexts because they help health systems to cope with emergencies by contributing to conducting some activities, such as the identification of public concerns, the detection of infections' symptoms, and the traceability of the virus diffusion. In this paper, we have analysed comments on events related to cholera, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, influenza, malaria, Spanish influenza, swine flu, tuberculosis, typhus, yellow fever, and Zika, collecting 369,472 tweets from 3 March to 15 September 2022. Our analysis has started with the collection of comments composed of unstructured texts on which we have applied natural language processing solutions. Following, we have employed topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques to obtain a collection of people's concerns and attitudes towards these pandemics. According to our findings, people's discussions were mostly about malaria, influenza, and tuberculosis, and the focus was on the diseases themselves. As regards emotions, the most popular were fear, trust, and disgust, where trust is mainly regarding HIV/AIDS tweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]