Abstract

Topic modeling is an important tool in social media analysis, allowing researchers to quickly understand large text corpora by investigating the topics underlying them. One of the fundamental problems of topic models lies in how to assess the quality of the topics from the perspective of human interpretability. How well can humans understand the meaning of topics generated by statistical topic modeling algorithms? In this work we advance the study of this question by introducing Topic Consensus: a new measure that calculates the quality of a topic through investigating its consensus with some known topics underlying the data. We view the quality of the topics from three perspectives: 1) topic interpretability, 2) how documents relate to the underlying topics, and 3) how interpretable the topics are when the corpus has an underlying categorization. We provide insights into how well the results of Mechanical Turk …

Date

October 21, 2025

Authors

Fred Morstatter, Jürgen Pfeffer, Katja Mayer, Huan Liu

Journal

Hypertext and Social Media

Volume

26

Publisher

ACM