A Topic Modeling Comparison Between LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, and BERTopic to Demystify Twitter Posts

🤖 Plain-English Summary

The richness of social media data has opened a new avenue for social science research to gain insights into human behaviors and experiences. In view of the interplay between human relations and digital media, this research takes Twitter posts as the reference point and assesses the performance of different algorithms concerning their strengths and weaknesses in a social science context.

🔑 Key Findings

• In particular, emerging data-driven approaches relying on topic models provide entirely new perspectives on interpreting social phenomena.
• However, the short, text-heavy, and unstructured nature of social media content often leads to methodological challenges in both data collection and analysis.
• In order to bridge the developing field of computational science and empirical social research, this study aims to evaluate the performance of four topic modeling techniques; namely latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), Top2Vec, and BERTopic.

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