Topic words analysis based on LDA model
This is an incremental application of existing methods to political email data for social network analysis.
The researchers applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze topic words in political emails from Obama.com to Columbus, Ohio, achieving a 30% speedup using parallel computing and a 53.96% higher precision rate compared to TF-IDF for finding target words.
Social network analysis (SNA), which is a research field describing and modeling the social connection of a certain group of people, is popular among network services. Our topic words analysis project is a SNA method to visualize the topic words among emails from Obama.com to accounts registered in Columbus, Ohio. Based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, a popular topic model of SNA, our project characterizes the preference of senders for target group of receptors. Gibbs sampling is used to estimate topic and word distribution. Our training and testing data are emails from the carbon-free server Datagreening.com. We use parallel computing tool BashReduce for word processing and generate related words under each latent topic to discovers typical information of political news sending specially to local Columbus receptors. Running on two instances using paralleling tool BashReduce, our project contributes almost 30% speedup processing the raw contents, comparing with processing contents on one instance locally. Also, the experimental result shows that the LDA model applied in our project provides precision rate 53.96% higher than TF-IDF model finding target words, on the condition that appropriate size of topic words list is selected.