Search

Topic modeling is a popular method used to describe biological count data. With topic models, the user must specify the number of topics |$K$|⁠. Since there is no definitive way to choose |$K$| and since a true value might not exist, we develop a method, which we call topic alignment , to study the relationships across models with different |$K$|⁠. In addition, we present three diagnostics based on the alignment. These techniques can show how many topics are consistently present across different models, if a topic is only transiently present, or if a topic splits into more topics when |$K$| increases. This strategy gives more insight into the process of generating the data than choosing a single value of |$K$| would. We design a visual representation of these cross-model relationships, show the effectiveness of these tools for interpreting the topics on simulated and real data, and release an accompanying R package, alto [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools develop mission statements in part to communicate their purposes of schooling to internal and external audiences. The goal of this study is to employ text analytic techniques to analyze school mission statements. Focusing on Arizona and New Jersey's schools, we seek to understand: 1) what themes (topics) emerge from their mission statements, 2) whether local context (politics) and institutional factors (being a charter) mediate topic prevalence, and 3) how similar school mission statements are to one another overall and across select factors. Using structural topic modeling we find that five topics emerge as particularly prevalent, and they address key purposes within the US context related to social, academic, and civic development with an emphasis on a safe environment and a sense of community. Local political leanings have a minor impact on the prevalence of topics but being a charter has a distinct influence. Compared to regular schools, charters are more likely to include themes related to preparing for college, academic approaches, and character and family ties, but they place lower emphasis on community and citizenship themes. School missions display moderate levels of similarity, indicating that a common set vocabulary has permeated schools' missions, though differences remain, including between states. Overall, this study deepens our understanding of the varieties of schools' missions and reveals text analytic techniques are well suited for uncovering them. Plain Language Summary: Schools develop mission statements in part to communicate their purposes of schooling to internal and external audiences. In a novel application, the goal of this study is to employ text analytic techniques to analyze school mission statements. Focusing on Arizona and New Jersey schools, we seek to understand what themes (topics) emerge from their mission statements, whether local context (politics) and institutional factors (being a charter) mediate topic prevalence, and how similar school mission statements are to one another overall and across select factors. Employing structural topic modeling, five themes emerge as most prevalent. The themes broadly address key purposes within the US context related to social, academic, and civic development with an emphasis on a safe environment and a sense of community. Local political leanings have a minor impact on the prevalence of topics but being a charter has a distinct influence. Compared to regular schools, charters are more likely to include themes related to preparing for college, academic approaches, and character and family ties, but they place lower emphasis on community and citizenship themes. School missions display moderate levels of similarity, indicating that a common set vocabulary has permeated, though differences remain, including between states. One limitation of the study is the focus on two states; however, preliminary analyses of a small national sample suggest comparable vocabularies. Overall, this study reveals school mission statements present meaningful variations in the purposes of schools. Schools are communicating interpretable goals and text data mining techniques are well suited for uncovering them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on addressing a critical limitation in recommender systems based on knowledge graphs (KGs) by introducing a new model called Topic-aware Intention Network (TIN) to explicitly model user intent for improved recommendations. Topics covered include the shortcomings of existing KG-based recommender systems, the proposed TIN model's architecture, and the benefits of incorporating user intent into recommendations.

Nowadays, online users write short messages to share their feelings on social networking sites, such as discussion forums, question answering websites, etc., making these sites very popular. The increase in these short-term messages causes a huge data sparsity, making emotion recognition a challenging task. Therefore, a word co-occurrence pattern called biterms is generated from a large-scale dataset to prevent severe data sparsity issues. The topic modeling algorithms and acceleration algorithms are implemented to extract more reliable topics from the group of terms. Based on biterm technique, in this paper, a new algorithm called "Affected biterm emotion topic" is proposed for emotion recognition from a short text. For the experimental purpose, two popular short text datasets, SemEval and International Survey on Emotion Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR), are used to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm with the benchmark methods light latent dirichlet allocation (LLDA), biterm topic model (BTM), emotion-topic model (ETM), contextual sentiment topic model (CSTM), Sentiment latent topic model (SLTM) and siasme network based supervised topic model (SNSTM). The proposed algorithm is evaluated using the benchmark methods for mean, variance, and accuracy. The experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm is effective in analyzing emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature location is a technique for determining source code that implements specific features in software. It developed to help minimize effort on program comprehension. The main challenge of feature location research is how to bridge the gap between abstract keywords in use cases and detail in source code. The use case scenarios are software requirements artifacts that state the input, logic, rules, actor, and output of a function in the software. The sentence on use case scenario is sometimes described another sentence in other use case scenario. This study contributes to creating expansion queries in feature locations by finding the relationship between use case scenarios. The relationships include inner association, outer association and intratoken association. The research employs latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to create model topics on source code. Query expansion using inner, outer and intratoken was tested for finding feature locations on a Java-based open-source project. The best precision rate was 50%. The best recall was 100%, which was found in several use case scenarios implemented in a few files. The best average precision rate was 16.7%, which was found in inner association experiments. The best average recall rate was 68.3%, which was found in all compound association experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political opposition to fiscal climate policy, such as a carbon tax, typically appeals to fiscal conservative ideology. Here, we ask to what extent public opposition to the carbon tax in Canada is, in fact, ideological in origin. As an object of study, ideology is a latent belief structure over a set of issue topics—and in particular their relationships—as revealed through stated opinions. Ideology is thus amenable to a generative modeling approach within the text-as-data paradigm. We use the Structural Topic Model, which generates word content from a set of latent topics and mixture weights placed on them. We fit the model to open-ended survey responses of Canadians elaborating on their support of or opposition to a carbon tax, then use it to infer the set of mixture weights used by each response. We demonstrate this set, moreso than the observed word use, serves efficient discrimination of opposition from support, with near-perfect accuracy on held-out data. We then operationalize ideology as the empirical distribution of inferred topic mixture weights. We propose and use an evaluation of ideology-driven beliefs based on four statistics of this distribution capturing the specificity, variability, expressivity, and alignment of the underlying ideology. We find that the ideology behind responses from respondents who opposed the carbon tax is more specific and aligned, much less expressive, and of similar variability as compared with those who support the tax. We discuss the implications of our results for climate policy and of broad application of our approach in social science.

IntroductionOver the last decade, there has been a growing interest in cereal-legume intercropping for sustainable agriculture. As a result numerous papers, including reviews, focus on this topic. Screening this large amount of papers, to identify knowledge gaps and future research opportunities, manually, would be a complex and time consuming task.Materials and methodsBibliometric analysis combined with text mining and topic modelling, to automatically find topics and to derive a representation of intercropping papers as a potential solution to reduce the workload was tested. Both common (e.g. wheat and soybean) as well as underutilized crops (e.g. buckwheat, lupin, triticale) were the focus of this study. The corpus used for the analysis was retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus on 5th September 2022 and consisted of 4,732 papers.ResultsThe number of papers on cereal-legume intercropping increased in recent years, with most studies being located in China. Literature mainly dealt with the cereals maize and wheat and the legume soybean whereas buckwheat and lupin received little attention from academic researchers. These underutilized crops are certainly interesting to be used as intercropping partners, however, additional research on optimization of management and cultivar’s choice is important. Yield and nitrogen fixation are the most commonly studied traits in cereal-legume intercropping. Last decade, there is an increasing interest in climate resilience, sustainability and biodiversity. Also the term “ecosystem services” came into play, but still with a low frequency. The regulating services and provisioning services seem to be the most studied, in contrast terms related to potential cultural services were not encountered.DiscussionIn conclusion, based on this review several research opportunities were identified. Minor crops like lupin and buckwheat need to be evaluated for their role as intercropping partners. The interaction between species based on e.g. root exudates needs to be further unraveled. Also diseases, pests and weeds in relation to intercropping deserve more attention and finally more in-depth research on the additional benefits/ecosystem services associated with intercropping systems is necessary.

[Purpose/Significance] The introduction of national poverty alleviation policies and rural revitalization strategies has thrust the issue of education for left-behind children into the spotlight of scholarly attention. Education, far beyond serving as a mere instrument for personal growth and human capital accumulation for left-behind children, emerges as a pivotal measure in consolidating rural poverty alleviation endeavors and breaking the transmission of intergenerational poverty in China. It stands as a vital force propelling the future of rural revitalization. Yet, the existing literature on the education of left-behind children remains sporadic and dispersed. A more profound organizational effort, integrating, synthesizing, and evaluating this scattered literature, is imperative to establish a foundational framework for future research, fostering more cohesive and focused research endeavors. Presently, literature review studies primarily fall into three categories: qualitative review methods, meta-analysis, and bibliometric analysis methods employing tools like Citespace. This study sets out to achieve a systematic and comprehensive understanding of education-related issues for rural left-behind children through text mining methods grounded in topic models. [Method/Process] The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has empowered the processing and analysis of vast amounts of textual data. Previous research, employing latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models, successfully mined texts related to teacher team construction reform policies, internationalization in higher education literature, news reports, and online comments. In this study, a corpus was meticulously constructed using abstract texts extracted from 2037 journal articles published between 2002 and 2023. The structural topic model (STM) was chosen for topic modeling, overcoming the limitations associated with LDA, with a specific emphasis on exploring the diversity and dynamism of topics within the existing literature. [Results/Conclusions] The culmination of this research effort identified eight distinct research themes: psychological well-being, factors leading to left-behind children, macro-level coping strategies, types of guardianship, review studies, family education, media literacy, and micro-level coping strategies. By synergizing document metadata information, the study systematically unraveled the evolving trends of these topics over time, providing crucial insights into potential shifts in the focus of left-behind children's education research. It is essential to note that this study, while collecting abstracts instead of full texts, may not capture the entirety of information contained in complete research articles. Future research endeavors should explore left-behind children's education more comprehensively, leveraging full-text mining techniques for a more nuanced understanding of this critical subject.

Abstract Background Topic models are a class of unsupervised machine learning models, which facilitate summarization, browsing and retrieval from large unstructured document collections. This study reviews several methods for assessing the quality of unsupervised topic models estimated using non-negative matrix factorization. Techniques for topic model validation have been developed across disparate fields. We synthesize this literature, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different techniques for topic model validation, and illustrate their usefulness for guiding model selection on a large clinical text corpus. Design, setting and data Using a retrospective cohort design, we curated a text corpus containing 382,666 clinical notes collected between 01/01/2017 through 12/31/2020 from primary care electronic medical records in Toronto Canada. Methods Several topic model quality metrics have been proposed to assess different aspects of model fit. We explored the following metrics: reconstruction error, topic coherence, rank biased overlap, Kendall’s weighted tau, partition coefficient, partition entropy and the Xie-Beni statistic. Depending on context, cross-validation and/or bootstrap stability analysis were used to estimate these metrics on our corpus. Results Cross-validated reconstruction error favored large topic models (K ≥ 100 topics) on our corpus. Stability analysis using topic coherence and the Xie-Beni statistic also favored large models (K = 100 topics). Rank biased overlap and Kendall’s weighted tau favored small models (K = 5 topics). Few model evaluation metrics suggested mid-sized topic models (25 ≤ K ≤ 75) as being optimal. However, human judgement suggested that mid-sized topic models produced expressive low-dimensional summarizations of the corpus. Conclusions Topic model quality indices are transparent quantitative tools for guiding model selection and evaluation. Our empirical illustration demonstrated that different topic model quality indices favor models of different complexity; and may not select models aligning with human judgment. This suggests that different metrics capture different aspects of model goodness of fit. A combination of topic model quality indices, coupled with human validation, may be useful in appraising unsupervised topic models.

In this paper, we describe the supervised dynamic correlated topic model (sDCTM) for classifying categorical time series. This model extends the correlated topic model used for analyzing textual documents to a supervised framework that features dynamic modeling of latent topics. sDCTM treats each time series as a document and each categorical value in the time series as a word in the document. We assume that the observed time series is generated by an underlying latent stochastic process. We develop a state-space framework to model the dynamic evolution of the latent process, i.e., the hidden thematic structure of the time series. Our model provides a Bayesian supervised learning (classification) framework using a variational Kalman filter EM algorithm. The E-step and M-step, respectively, approximate the posterior distribution of the latent variables and estimate the model parameters. The fitted model is then used for the classification of new time series and for information retrieval that is useful for practitioners. We assess our method using simulated data. As an illustration to real data, we apply our method to promoter sequence identification data to classify E. coli DNA sub-sequences by uncovering hidden patterns or motifs that can serve as markers for promoter presence.

Abstract Existing work generally classifies news headlines as a matter of short text classification. However, due to the strong domain nature and limited text length of news headlines, their classification results are usually determined by several specific keywords, which makes the traditional short text classification method ineffective. In this paper, we propose a new method to identify keywords in news headlines and expand their features from sentence level and word level respectively, and finally use convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract and classify their features. The proposed model was tested on the Sogou News Corpus dataset and achieved 93.42 $$\%$$ % accuracy.

[Objective] Because the decision-making process of the government follows the principle of “satisfaction” rather than “optimization”, attitude becomes a key element in the decision-making process. From this perspective, this study examined how the ecological governance attitude of higher-level government acts on the attention allocation of lower-level governments. [Methods] Based on the topic model and machine learning techniques, this study examined 3648 provincial and municipal government work reports (2010-2021) sentence by sentence. Then the ecological governance attitude and attention allocation of the provincial and municipal governments were measured and analyzed. [Results] The study found that the ecological governance attitude of higher-level governments can directly and indirectly act on the attention allocation of lower-level governments, and the ecological governance attitude of lower-level governments themselves plays a mediation role in the process. There are differences in the influence of different attitudes on attention. The increase of negative attitude of higher-level governments towards ecological governance significantly improves the attention allocation of lower-level governments, indicating the “deterrent effect” of negative attitude; while the improvement of the positive attitude of higher-level governments reduces the attention allocation of lower-level governments, which indicate the competitive relationship and “crowding out effect” of different issues on local governments’ attention. The results were also verified through robustness tests, including measuring government attention by governance data on the Internet, and testing the “attitude-attention” relationship under the issue of “production safety”. [Conclusion] This article argued that the government should pay attention to the role of government attitude as a management signal, and take the expression framework of government attitude as an important management tool, to reasonably regulate the attention allocation of ecological governance of local governments.

Retelling extraction is an important branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP), and high-quality retelling resources are very helpful to improve the performance of machine translation. However, traditional methods based on the bilingual parallel corpus often ignore the document background in the process of retelling acquisition and application. In order to solve this problem, we introduce topic model information into the translation mode and propose a topic-based statistical machine translation method to improve the translation performance. In this method, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is used to obtains the co-occurrence relationship between words and documents by the hybrid matrix decomposition. Then we design a decoder to simplify the decoding process. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of translation.

[Purpose/Significance] The introduction of national poverty alleviation policies and rural revitalization strategies has thrust the issue of education for left-behind children into the spotlight of scholarly attention. Education, far beyond serving as a mere instrument for personal growth and human capital accumulation for left-behind children, emerges as a pivotal measure in consolidating rural poverty alleviation endeavors and breaking the transmission of intergenerational poverty in China. It stands as a vital force propelling the future of rural revitalization. Yet, the existing literature on the education of left-behind children remains sporadic and dispersed. A more profound organizational effort, integrating, synthesizing, and evaluating this scattered literature, is imperative to establish a foundational framework for future research, fostering more cohesive and focused research endeavors. Presently, literature review studies primarily fall into three categories: qualitative review methods, meta-analysis, and bibliometric analysis methods employing tools like Citespace. This study sets out to achieve a systematic and comprehensive understanding of education-related issues for rural left-behind children through text mining methods grounded in topic models. [Method/Process] The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has empowered the processing and analysis of vast amounts of textual data. Previous research, employing latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models, successfully mined texts related to teacher team construction reform policies, internationalization in higher education literature, news reports, and online comments. In this study, a corpus was meticulously constructed using abstract texts extracted from 2037 journal articles published between 2002 and 2023. The structural topic model (STM) was chosen for topic modeling, overcoming the limitations associated with LDA, with a specific emphasis on exploring the diversity and dynamism of topics within the existing literature. [Results/Conclusions] The culmination of this research effort identified eight distinct research themes: psychological well-being, factors leading to left-behind children, macro-level coping strategies, types of guardianship, review studies, family education, media literacy, and micro-level coping strategies. By synergizing document metadata information, the study systematically unraveled the evolving trends of these topics over time, providing crucial insights into potential shifts in the focus of left-behind children's education research. It is essential to note that this study, while collecting abstracts instead of full texts, may not capture the entirety of information contained in complete research articles. Future research endeavors should explore left-behind children's education more comprehensively, leveraging full-text mining techniques for a more nuanced understanding of this critical subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Single-cell RNA sequencing has significantly contributed to the discovery of heterogenous cellular programs that are highly expressed by distinct cell subtypes. Yet, the quantification of cell subtype-specific and shared gene co-expressing modules (GEMs) associated with cell differentiation is a challenge. Herein, we have developed scGEM to uncover such hidden GEMs and conducted a systematic evaluation of model performance as well as a comparison with existing methods. We demonstrate that scGEM has the potential to generate a better biological explanation of GEMs using simulated and real-world datasets. The positive impacts of this study can illuminate the interpretation of gene modules in single-cell transcriptome analysis and shed light on the cell–cell communication and regulatory network. Background: Single-cell transcriptome analysis has fundamentally changed biological research by allowing higher-resolution computational analysis of individual cells and subsets of cell types. However, few methods have met the need to recognize and quantify the underlying cellular programs that determine the specialization and differentiation of the cell types. Methods: In this study, we present scGEM, a nested tree-structured nonparametric Bayesian model, to reveal the gene co-expression modules (GEMs) reflecting transcriptome processes in single cells. Results: We show that scGEM can discover shared and specialized transcriptome signals across different cell types using peripheral blood mononuclear single cells and early brain development single cells. scGEM outperformed other methods in perplexity and topic coherence (p < 0.001) on our simulation data. Larger datasets, deeper trees and pre-trained models are shown to be positively associated with better scGEM performance. The GEMs obtained from triple-negative breast cancer single cells exhibited better correlations with lymphocyte infiltration (p = 0.009) and the cell cycle (p < 0.001) than other methods in additional validation on the bulk RNAseq dataset. Conclusions: Altogether, we demonstrate that scGEM can be used to model the hidden cellular functions of single cells, thereby unveiling the specialization and generalization of transcriptomic programs across different types of cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety of air traffic control (ATC) operations is an important cornerstone for the sustainable development of the civil aviation industry. In order to clarify the risk factors in the control operation process and to achieve digital representation of the safety risks of civil aviation control operations, starting from the ATC incident reports, we fully mine the safety risk information and unspoken rules of ATC operations. A risk perception model for air traffic control operations safety based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and the Semantic Network Based on BERT (BSN) model is suggested. First, 17 risk topics and keywords were found in the incident reports collected using the LDA topic model. These topics included those pertaining to the stage of aircraft operation, human factors in control operation, and the sector or airspace operation status and structure. The findings indicate that while most risk subjects have not changed significantly, they do show an upward tendency. Human factors and operational rules and procedures account for the highest share of all key causes, and they also have a significant impact on how risk topics evolve over time. Finally, the BSN model in the air traffic control field was built based on the keywords of each risk issue in order to highlight any potential correlations between distinct risk topics. The results show that some risk topics have interrelated risk characteristics, and there are regularities of mutual evolution between these risk topics. The relevant research results can better mine air traffic control unsafe information and lay a foundation for accurately perceiving air traffic control operations risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Topic models are a class of unsupervised machine learning models, which facilitate summarization, browsing and retrieval from large unstructured document collections. This study reviews several methods for assessing the quality of unsupervised topic models estimated using non-negative matrix factorization. Techniques for topic model validation have been developed across disparate fields. We synthesize this literature, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different techniques for topic model validation, and illustrate their usefulness for guiding model selection on a large clinical text corpus. Design, setting and data: Using a retrospective cohort design, we curated a text corpus containing 382,666 clinical notes collected between 01/01/2017 through 12/31/2020 from primary care electronic medical records in Toronto Canada. Methods: Several topic model quality metrics have been proposed to assess different aspects of model fit. We explored the following metrics: reconstruction error, topic coherence, rank biased overlap, Kendall's weighted tau, partition coefficient, partition entropy and the Xie-Beni statistic. Depending on context, cross-validation and/or bootstrap stability analysis were used to estimate these metrics on our corpus. Results: Cross-validated reconstruction error favored large topic models (K ≥ 100 topics) on our corpus. Stability analysis using topic coherence and the Xie-Beni statistic also favored large models (K = 100 topics). Rank biased overlap and Kendall's weighted tau favored small models (K = 5 topics). Few model evaluation metrics suggested mid-sized topic models (25 ≤ K ≤ 75) as being optimal. However, human judgement suggested that mid-sized topic models produced expressive low-dimensional summarizations of the corpus. Conclusions: Topic model quality indices are transparent quantitative tools for guiding model selection and evaluation. Our empirical illustration demonstrated that different topic model quality indices favor models of different complexity; and may not select models aligning with human judgment. This suggests that different metrics capture different aspects of model goodness of fit. A combination of topic model quality indices, coupled with human validation, may be useful in appraising unsupervised topic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) is a highly heterogeneous disease with significant differences in prevalence, mortality, complications, and treatment modalities across age, sex, race, and ethnicity. An improved knowledge of disease characteristics results from the use of a data-driven phenotypic classification strategy to identify patients of different subtypes and expose the clinical traits of different subtypes. This study used topic models and process mining techniques to perform subtyping of ESRD patients on hemodialysis based on real-world longitudinal electronic health record data. The mined subtypes are interpretable and clinically significant, and they can reflect differences in the progression of the disease state and clinical outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the SASC (Sentiment Analysis based on Sentiment Clustering) method is proposed to solve the problems of low accuracy and poor stability in the review sentiment clustering methods. Through two-stage sentiment clustering, the hidden sentiment information among the review texts is obtained to improve the accuracy and stability of the results. Specifically, in the first stage, the review representation vector construction method is put forward through the topic model LDA. Then the second stage uses K-means algorithm to achieve further optimization of the sentiment clustering results. In the experiment part, the evaluation methods of sentiment clustering are firstly introduced, and then a series of experiments are carried out on two widely used datasets Large Movie Review Dataset v1.0 and Multi-Domain Sentiment Dataset. Experiment results indicate that compared with other methods, the SASC method proposed in this paper has better clustering accuracy and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dedicated applications(apps) for child-rearing question and answer(QA) system have become common tools widely used by many parents in Japan. A user can post his/her various questions about child-rearing on the systems and exchange information with other parents online. Since the value of such dedicated applications increases through being used by a large number of users, it is considered important to continuously provide attractive functions to increase user satisfaction. Here, concerns of parents should be changed depending on their children’s life stages. In addition, it can be assumed that users always have concerns of child-rearing even when they do not post any questions on the application. Therefore, analysis and comprehension of the problems of parents rearing small children by taking into account these properties will lead to the improving the users’ satisfaction of QA services. For instance, the app can provide users with proper information with appropriate timing based on the analysis result. Although topic models are widely known to analyze the content of text data, this is not a sufficient method for visualizing changes in topics over time from question text data, which are relatively short sentences posted on dedicated apps for child-rearing QA systems. In this study, the authors propose an analytical model that can extract the topics of users’ concerns from question data and compile topic transitions throughout the various stages of child-rearing. Furthermore, by taking a probabilistic view of the topic transitions, a method for estimating the topic that is most likely to shift from a previous topic at a given time to the next non-question period is constructed. Finally, the authors show the results of applying the proposed method to an actual data set and clarify the usefulness of the estimation result using the proposed method. The proposed method makes it possible to analyze how the worries and concerns of parents raising children evolve over time, and to gain various new insights into the perspectives of support for these users through apps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have become a popular platform for users to share their activities with friends and families, which provide abundant information for us to study issues of group venue recommendation by utilizing the characteristics of check-in data. Although there are some studies on group recommendation for venues, few studies consider the group’s venue preference in different temporal patterns. In this article, we discover that the group’s activity venue has a temporal effect, that is, the group’s preference for the activity venue is different at different times. For example, a couple of lovers prefer to travel to tropical regions in winter and relax in bars in the evening. Based on this discovery, we present a Time-aware Multi-pattern (TaMp) topic model to capture the group’s interest in the activity venue in multiple temporal patterns (including the daily pattern, the weekly pattern, the monthly pattern, and the quarterly pattern). The TaMp model takes into account the topic, members, temporality, and venue information of group activities and the latent relations among them, especially the strong correlation between the activity time and the corresponding activity venue. Then, we propose a group venue recommendation method based on the TaMp model. In addition, an improved grouping algorithm (iGA) in LBSNs is put forward to enhance the rationality of grouping and the accuracy of group venue recommendation. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance of TaMp on two real-world datasets. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art group venue recommendation and demonstrates the significance of temporal effects in explaining group activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of South-Central Minzu University (Natural Science Edition) is the property of Journal of South-Central Minzu University (Natural Science Edition) Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Question routing (QR) aims to route newly submitted questions to the potential experts most likely to provide answers. Many previous works formalize the question routing task as a text matching and ranking problem between questions and user profiles, focusing on text representation and semantic similarity computation. However, these works often fail to extract matching features efficiently and lack deep contextual textual understanding. Moreover, we argue that in addition to the semantic similarity between terms, the interactive relationship between question sequences and user profile sequences also plays an important role in matching. In this paper, we proposed two BERT-based models called QR-BERTrep and QR-tBERTint to address these issues from different perspectives. QR-BERTrep is a representation-based feature ensemble model in which we integrated a weighted sum of BERT layer outputs as an extra feature into a Siamese deep matching network, aiming to address the non-context-aware word embedding and limited semantic understanding. QR-tBERTint is an interaction-based model that explores the interactive relationships between sequences as well as the semantic similarity of terms through a topic-enhanced BERT model. Specifically, it fuses a short-text-friendly topic model to capture corpus-level semantic information. Experimental results on real-world data demonstrate that QR-BERTrep significantly outperforms other traditional representation-based models. Meanwhile, QR-tBERTint exceeds QR-BERTrep and QR-BERTint with a maximum increase of 17.26% and 11.52% in MAP, respectively, showing that combining global topic information and exploring interactive relationships between sequences is quite effective for question routing tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In gathering information for an intended purchase decision, consumers submit search phrases to online search engines. These search phrases directly express the consumers' needs in their own words and thus provide valuable information to marketing managers. Interpreting consumers' search phrases renders a better understanding of their purchase intentions, which is critical for marketing success. In this article, the authors develop an integrated model to connect the latent topics embedded in consumers' search phrases to their website visits and purchase decisions. Using a unique data set containing more than 8,000 search phrases submitted by consumers, the model identifies latent topics underlying the searches that led consumers to the firm's website. Compared with a model lacking any textual information from consumers' search phrases, a model using textual data in a heuristic approach, and a model based on the latent Dirichlet allocation, the proposed model provides a better evaluation of a consumer's position on the path to purchase and achieves much better predictive accuracy, which could in turn substantially increase the firm's revenue. The authors also extend the discussion to aggregators, affiliated websites, and segments of consumers who are exposed to the firm's outbound ads. Marketing managers can use this method to extract structured information from consumers' search phrases to facilitate their inference of consumers' latent purchase states and thereby improve marketing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Laws and legal decision-making regulate how societies function. Therefore, they evolve and adapt to new social paradigms and reflect changes in culture and social norms, and are a good proxy for the evolution of socially sensitive issues. Here, we use an information-theoretic methodology to quantitatively track trends and shifts in the evolution of large corpora of judicial decisions, and thus to detect periods in which disruptive topics arise. When applied to a large database containing the full text of over 100,000 judicial decisions from Spanish courts, we are able to identify an abrupt change in housing-related decisions around 2016. Because our information-theoretic approach pinpoints the specific content that drives change, we are also able to interpret the results in terms of the role played by legislative changes, landmark decisions, and the influence of social movements.

In the era of big data and ubiquitous internet connectivity, user feedback data plays a crucial role in product development and improvement. However, extracting valuable insights from the vast pool of unstructured text data found in user feedback presents significant challenges. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to tackle this challenge by combining the Contextualized Topic Model (CTM) and the Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding (MPNet) model. Our approach aims to create a more accurate and context-aware topic model that enhances the understanding of user experiences and opinions. To achieve this, we first search for the optimal number of topics, focusing on generating distinguishable, general, and unique topics. Next, we perform hyperparameter optimization to fine-tune the model and maximize coherence metrics. The result is an exceptionally effective model that outperforms established topic modeling methods, including LSI, NMF, LDA, HDP, NeuralLDA, ProdLDA, ETM, and the default CTM, achieving the highest coherence CV score of 0.7091. In this study, the combination of CTM and MPNet has proven highly effective in the context of user feedback topic modeling. This model excels in generating coherent, distinguishable, and highly relevant user feedback topics, capturing the nuanced nature of user feedback data. The topics generated from this model include ‘Music and Audio Streaming,’ ’Application Performance,’ ‘Banking, Financial Services, and Customer Support,’ ’User Experience,’ ‘Other Topics,’ ’Application Content,’ and ‘Application Features.’ Our contributions include a powerful tool for developers to gain deeper insights, prioritize actions, and enhance user satisfaction by incorporating feedback into future product iterations. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset as an open-source resource for further exploration and validation of user feedback analysis techniques and general natural language processing applications. With our proposed approach, we strive to drive business success, improve user experiences, and inform data-driven decision-making processes, ultimately benefiting both developers and users alike.

Social networks are becoming increasingly popular and significant. One of the most distinctive features of these networks is their dynamic nature, which means that they change over time. Consequently, the community structure on these platforms also changes with time, making the detection of community structure a crucial area of research. Specifically, there is still a lack of understanding of how social networks and communities evolve over time. In this paper, we reveal that individual changing topics (i.e., individual temporal semantics) are a vital factor that drives community evolution. A novel dynamic community detection model is proposed, which takes into account natural evolutionary features. The model first partitions social networks into snapshots. It then detects the community structure at each snapshot by utilizing individual changing topics and information from the previous snapshot. Finally, the evolution of users’ interested topic distributions and topic distributions of communities are identified. The model is compared with five state-of-the-art baselines on two real datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms all baselines.

For both passenger and freight transportation, railroad operations must be dependable, accessible, maintained, and safe (RAMS). In many urban areas, railway stations risk and safety accidents represent an essential safety concern for daily operations. Moreover, the accidents lead to damage to market reputation, including injuries and anxiety among the people and costs. This stations under pressure caused by higher demand which consuming infrastructure and raised the safety administration consideration. To analysing these accidents and utilising the technology such AI methods to enhance safety, it is suggested to use unsupervised topic modelling for better understand the contributors to these extreme accidents. It is conducted to optimise Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for fatality accidents in the railway stations from textual data gathered RSSB including 1000 accidents in the UK railway station. This research describes using the machine learning topic method for systematic spot accident characteristics to enhance safety and risk management in the stations and provides advanced analysing. The study evaluates the efficacy of text by mining from accident history, gaining information, lesson learned and deeply coherent of the risk caused by assessing fatalities accidents for large and enduring scale. This Intelligent Text Analysis presents predictive accuracy for valuable accident information such as root causes and the hot spots in the railway stations. Further, the big data analytics ’ improvement results in an understanding of the accidents’ nature in ways not possible if a considerable amount of safety history and not through narrow domain analysis of the accident reports. This technology renders stand with high accuracy and a beneficial and extensive new era of AI applications in railway industry safety and other fields for safety applications.

To address the limitations of existing methods of short-text entity disambiguation, specifically in terms of their insufficient feature extraction and reliance on massive training samples, we propose an entity disambiguation model called COLBERT, which fuses LDA-based topic features and BERT-based semantic features, as well as using contrastive learning, to enhance the disambiguation process. Experiments on a publicly available Chinese short-text entity disambiguation dataset show that the proposed model achieves an F1-score of 84.0%, which outperforms the benchmark method by 0.6%. Moreover, our model achieves an F1-score of 74.5% with a limited number of training samples, which is 2.8% higher than the benchmark method. These results demonstrate that our model achieves better effectiveness and robustness and can reduce the burden of data annotation as well as training costs.

Background: Autonomous ships have the potential to increase operational efficiency and reduce carbon footprints through technology and innovation. However, there is no comprehensive literature review of all the different types of papers related to autonomous ships, especially with regard to their integration with ports. This paper takes a systematic review approach to extract and summarize the main topics related to autonomous ships in the fields of container shipping and port management. Methods: A machine learning method is used to extract the main topics from more than 2000 journal publications indexed in WoS and Scopus. Results: The research findings highlight key issues related to technology, cybersecurity, data governance, regulations, and legal frameworks, providing a different perspective compared to human manual reviews of papers. Conclusions: Our search results confirm several recommendations. First, from a technological perspective, it is advised to increase support for the research and development of autonomous underwater vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles, establish safety standards, mandate testing of wave model evaluation systems, and promote international standardization. Second, from a cyber–physical systems perspective, efforts should be made to strengthen logistics and supply chains for autonomous ships, establish data governance protocols, enforce strict control over IoT device data, and strengthen cybersecurity measures. Third, from an environmental perspective, measures should be implemented to address the environmental impact of autonomous ships. This can be achieved by promoting international agreements from a global societal standpoint and clarifying the legal framework regarding liability in the event of accidents.

In the era of the explosion of digital content of large‐scale self‐media, user‐friendly social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, provide opportunities for people to express their ideas and opinions freely. Due to lack of restrictions, hateful speech and its exposure can have profound psychological impacts on society. Current social networking platform is over‐reliant on the manual check, and it is labor‐intensive and time‐consuming. Although there are many machines learning methods for the detection of hate speech, short text with character limit on social platforms is more challenging for the detection of hate speech and offensive language. To address the problem of data sparsity, we have proposed a topic memory model for hate speech and offensive language detection (abbreviated as TM‐HOL). Potential topics are generated with our encoder and decoder to enrich short text features. Two memory matrices correspond to the topic words and the text, and the hate feature matrix is used to learn the syntactic features. It is demonstrated that our proposed method is effective on three datasets, performing better weighted‐F1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multidimensional scoring evaluates each constructed‐response answer from more than one rating dimension and/or trait such as lexicon, organization, and supporting ideas instead of only one holistic score, to help students distinguish between various dimensions of writing quality. In this work, we present a bilevel learning model for combining two objectives, the multidimensional automated scoring, and the students' writing structure analysis and interpretation. The dual objectives are enabled by a supervised model, called Latent Dirichlet Allocation Multitask Learning (LDAMTL), integrating a topic model and a multitask learning model with an attention mechanism. Two empirical data sets were employed to indicate LDAMTL model performance. On one hand, results suggested that LDAMTL owns better scoring and QW‐κ values than two other competitor models, the supervised latent Dirichlet allocation, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers at the 5% significance level. On the other hand, extracted topic structures revealed that students with a higher language score tended to employ more compelling words to support the argument in their answers. This study suggested that LDAMTL not only demonstrates the model performance by conjugating the underlying shared representation of each topic and learned representation from the neural networks but also helps understand students' writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid transition of livestock husbandry in the 20th century involved a broad adoption of slurry-based livestock housing systems that resulted in farm economic benefits, but also in societal debate related to the environment and animal welfare. In this article, we apply the method of topic modeling to four major German newspapers to identify thematic emphases and changes in coverage around "slurry". We considered more than 2300 articles published between 1971 and 2020. Our results show that reporting encompasses economic, environmental, and social topics in which slurry is represented mostly critically ("poisonous substance"), occasionally neutrally ("scent of countryside"), or rarely positively ("input for the bioeconomy"). Three meta-themes overarch the majority of issues and reflect public discourse on agriculture: (i) the dichotomy of agricultural industrialization and family farming; (ii) contrasting actualities of factory farming and animal welfare; and (iii) the responsibility of policy for the emergence, existence and solution of livestock and slurry-related problems. A more balanced recognition of mutual values and constraints by the media could contribute to a discursive reconciliation of public and private interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]