Interactive Topic Modeling for Exploring Asynchronous Online Conversations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the mid-2000s, there has been exponential growth of asynchronous online conversations, thanks to the rise of social media. Analyzing and gaining insights from such conversations can be quite challenging for a user, especially when the discussion becomes very long. A promising solution to this problem is topic modeling, since it may help the user to understand quickly what was discussed in a long conversation and to explore the comments of interest. However, the results of topic modeling can be noisy, and they may not match the user’s current information needs. To address this problem, we propose a novel topic modeling system for asynchronous conversations that revises the model on the fly on the basis of users’ feedback. We then integrate this system with interactive visualization techniques to support the user in exploring long conversations, as well as in revising the topic model when the current results are not adequate to fulfill the user’s information needs. Finally, we report on an evaluation with real users that compared the resulting system with both a traditional interface and an interactive visual interface that does not support human-in-the-loop topic modeling. Both the quantitative results and the subjective feedback from the participants illustrate the potential benefits of our interactive topic modeling approach for exploring conversations, relative to its counterparts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".