SocialVisTUM: An Interactive Visualization Toolkit for Correlated Neural Topic Models on Social Media Opinion Mining
This is an incremental tool for researchers and analysts in social media opinion mining to explore topic models interactively.
The paper tackles the problem of visualizing correlated topic models for social media opinion mining by introducing SocialVisTUM, an interactive toolkit that displays topics as nodes and correlations as edges, with features like representative words and sentiment distributions, and demonstrates it on organic food discussion data, confirming qualitative research findings.
Recent research in opinion mining proposed word embedding-based topic modeling methods that provide superior coherence compared to traditional topic modeling. In this paper, we demonstrate how these methods can be used to display correlated topic models on social media texts using SocialVisTUM, our proposed interactive visualization toolkit. It displays a graph with topics as nodes and their correlations as edges. Further details are displayed interactively to support the exploration of large text collections, e.g., representative words and sentences of topics, topic and sentiment distributions, hierarchical topic clustering, and customizable, predefined topic labels. The toolkit optimizes automatically on custom data for optimal coherence. We show a working instance of the toolkit on data crawled from English social media discussions about organic food consumption. The visualization confirms findings of a qualitative consumer research study. SocialVisTUM and its training procedures are accessible online.