A Bimodal Network Approach to Model Topic Dynamics
This work addresses the need for analyzing semantic changes in scientific literature, specifically in economic thought, but it appears incremental as it builds upon existing LDA methods.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling topic evolution in scientific fields by introducing an intertemporal bimodal network approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), resulting in the development of three indexes to track topic transformation, birth/death rates, and novelty over time, tested on a corpus of thousands of papers spanning over 100 years.
This paper presents an intertemporal bimodal network to analyze the evolution of the semantic content of a scientific field within the framework of topic modeling, namely using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The main contribution is the conceptualization of the topic dynamics and its formalization and codification into an algorithm. To benchmark the effectiveness of this approach, we propose three indexes which track the transformation of topics over time, their rate of birth and death, and the novelty of their content. Applying the LDA, we test the algorithm both on a controlled experiment and on a corpus of several thousands of scientific papers over a period of more than 100 years which account for the history of the economic thought.