ConVisIT: Interactive Topic Modeling for Exploring Asynchronous Online Conversations

Enamul Hoque, Giuseppe Carenini

Abstract: In the last decade, there has been an exponential growth of asynchronous online conversations thanks to the rise of social media. Analyzing and gaining insights from such conversations can be quite challenging for a user, especially when the discussion becomes very long. A promising solution to this problem is topic modeling, since it may help the user to quickly understand what was discussed in the long conversation and explore the comments of interest. However, the results of topic modeling can be noisy and may not match the user's current information needs. To address this problem, we propose a novel topic modeling system for asynchronous conversations that revises the model on the fly based on user's feedback. We then integrate this system with interactive visualization techniques to support the user in exploring long conversations, as well as revising the topic model when the current results are not adequate to fulfill her information needs. An evaluation with real users illustrates the potential benefits of our approach for exploring conversations, when compared to both a traditional interface as well as an interactive visual interface that does not support human-in-the-loop topic model.