An Interactive Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Uncovering Latent Themes in Large Text Collections

Anonymous

Keywords: interactive, thematic analysis, latent themes, text collections, humans-in-the-loop, machine-in-the-loop, neuro-symbolic

Abstract: Experts across diverse disciplines are often interested in making sense of large text collections. Traditionally, this challenge is approached either by noisy unsupervised techniques such as topic models, or by following a manual theme discovery process. In this paper, we expand the definition of a theme to account for more than just a word distribution, and include generalized attributes and concepts emerging from the data. Then, we propose an interactive neuro-symbolic framework that receives expert feedback at different levels of abstraction. Our framework strikes a balance between automation and manual coding, allowing experts to maintain control of their study while reducing the manual effort required.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Information Retrieval and Text Mining