Topic Diffusion Discovery based on Sparseness-constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method combining sparseness-constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization and Jensen-Shannon divergence to discover and visualize the evolution and diffusion of research topics in large text datasets.

Contribution

It presents a new technique for identifying and visualizing topic diffusion and evolution in scholarly literature using advanced matrix factorization and divergence measures.

Findings

Extracts prominent topics from large datasets

Visualizes term-topic relationships and evolution

Helps identify emerging research topics

Abstract

Due to recent explosion of text data, researchers have been overwhelmed by ever-increasing volume of articles produced by different research communities. Various scholarly search websites, citation recommendation engines, and research databases have been created to simplify the text search tasks. However, it is still difficult for researchers to be able to identify potential research topics without doing intensive reviews on a tremendous number of articles published by journals, conferences, meetings, and workshops. In this paper, we consider a novel topic diffusion discovery technique that incorporates sparseness-constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization with generalized Jensen-Shannon divergence to help understand term-topic evolutions and identify topic diffusions. Our experimental result shows that this approach can extract more prominent topics from large article databases, visualize relationships between terms of interest and abstract topics, and further help researchers understand whether given terms/topics have been widely explored or whether new topics are emerging from literature.