ASRC 4513 - Science Fiction and the Value of Utopia/Dystopia 3-21-2017

This page is a companion to a guest lecture on text analysis for ASRC 4513 - Science Fiction and the Value of Utopia/Dystopia (instructor: Ricardo Wilson) 3/21/2017 in 701 Olin Library.  

Topic modeling - framing

What is topic modeling?

• Probabilistic model

  "...words that appear frequently together..."

  "Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text. A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings." From MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit, Topic Modeling, http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/topics.php retrieved 2017-03-08

• "Unsupervised" - see tail end of https://tedunderwood.com/2015/06/04/seven-ways-humanists-are-using-computers-to-understand-text/
  

  outline of tensions

  • language apart from semantics
  • revisit Ted Underwood's blogpost, "Seven ways humanists are using computers to understand text" 
  • What does this mean from the perspective of IS/CS?
  • What does this mean for studies in literature?

Topic modeling - optional - resources for diving deeper

How does it work?

• Processing - LDA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation

• Derive a set of secondary data from the text - typically something like the images from Probabilistic Topic Models by Steyvers and Griffiths (2007), see page 2

Sample Visualizations

• word clouds (sample topics in a word cloud from Shakespeare's Comedies)
• termite - http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/termite
• TAPoR - http://tapor.ca/tools?page=1&query=topic%20model
• Mimno’s wordsim - https://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/wordsim/nearest.html?q=monarchy

Implementations of LDA

• MALLET - Java - http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/index.php
• Stanford’s Topic modeling Toolbox (obsolete) - Scala http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tmt/tmt-0.4/
• topicmodels - R package - https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=topicmodels 
• Python - genism package - https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/