Building the Bridge

Author(s)
Fabienne Lind, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Olga Eisele, Tobias Heidenreich, Sebastian Galyga, Hajo Boomgaarden
Abstract

In communication research, topic modeling is primarily used for discovering systematic patterns in monolingual text corpora. To advance the usage, we provide an overview of recently presented strategies to extract topics from multilingual text collections for the purpose of comparative research. Moreover, we discuss, demonstrate, and facilitate the usability of the "Polylingual Topic Model" (PLTM) for such analyses. The appeal of this model is that it derives lists of related clustered words in different languages with little reliance on translation or multilingual dictionaries and without the need for manual post-hoc matching of topics. PLTM bridges the gap between languages by making use of document connections in training documents. As these training documents are the crucial resource for the model, we compare model evaluation metrics for different strategies to build training documents. By discussing the advantages and limitations of the different strategies in respect to different scenarios, our study contributes to the methodological discussion on automated content analysis of multilingual text corpora.

Organisation(s)
Department of Communication
Journal
Communication Methods & Measures
Volume
16
Pages
96-114
No. of pages
19
ISSN
1931-2458
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2021.1965973
Publication date
09-2021
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
508007 Communication science, 508014 Journalism
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Communication
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/building-the-bridge(156a18e5-d627-437b-b49b-0728098c6110).html