Abstract
Within the field of Digital Humanities, unsupervised machine learning techniques such as topic modeling have gained a lot of attention over the last years to explore vast volumes of non-structured textual data. Even if this technique is useful to capture recurring themes across document sets which have no metadata, the interpretation of topics has been consistently highlighted in the literature as problematic. This paper proposes a novel method based on Word Embeddings to facilitate the interpretation of terms which constituted a topic, allowing to discern different concepts automatically within a topic. In order to demonstrate this method, the paper uses the “Cabinet Papers” held and digitised by the The National Archives (TNA) of the United Kingdom (UK). After a discussion of our results, based on coherence measures, we provide details of how we can linguistically interpret these results.
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© 2020 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
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Coeckelbergs, M., Van Hooland, S. (2020). Concepts in Topics. Using Word Embeddings to Leverage the Outcomes of Topic Modeling for the Exploration of Digitized Archival Collections. In: Mugnaini, R. (eds) Data and Information in Online Environments. DIONE 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 319. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50072-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50072-6_4
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