For this lab, I used the mini-corpus I created in Lab 3, called Humor (Bookshelf).

 

  1. To get started, I input the plain-text files from that mini-corpus into the Topic Modeling Tool. I did this by clicking “Select Input File or Dir” before navigating to my desktop folder, which contained my Lab 3 folder, which in turn held the plain-text files from the Humor bookshelf. Then, I individually selected each of the eight plain-text files to input them into the Topic Modeling Tool.

 

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  1. After inputting the plain-text files and clicking “Advanced,” I was able to configure specific settings. I decided to change the “No. of topic words printed” from 10 to 15, so that I would be presented with a wider array of words to view pertaining to the topics of my mini-corpus.

 

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  1. After changing the settings of what I wanted the Topic Modeling Tool to do, I selected “Learn Topics”. After processing my plain-text files, the Topic Modeling Tool provided me with 10 topics of my mini-corpus, and in each topic line there were 15 words associated with that particular topic. By studying these topics and words, I could get a sense of the more prominent subjects and descriptors in my mini-corpus.

 

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  1. In order to help one study the topics more easily, the Topic Modeling Tool creates an HTML file with the topics, that can be opened in Google Chrome and has links.

 

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  1. When clicking on any of the topics, the link takes you to another page that ranks the documents in the mini-corpus according to their relevance to that topic (by the number of words in the document assigned to the topic).

 

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  1. Clicking on any of these docs takes it a step further and shows the top three topics in the document, assigning the topics a percentage based on the number of words in the document that go with the topic.

 

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The Topic Modeling Tool makes it easier for those who want to not only identify the most important topics of a corpus, but also gain an understanding of the words associated with the topics, and how integral the topics and words are in different documents.