Keyword-centered Collocating Topic Analysis
The rapid flow of information and the abundance of text data on the Internet have brought about the urgent demand for the construction of monitoring resources and techniques used for various purposes. To extract facets of information useful for particular domains from such large and dynamically growing corpora requires an unsupervised yet transparent ways of analyzing the textual data. This paper proposed a hybrid collocation analysis as a potential method to retrieve and summarize Taiwan-related topics posted on Weibo and PTT. By grouping collocates of 臺灣 ‘Taiwan’ into clusters of topics via either word embeddings clustering or Latent Dirichlet allocation, lists of collocates can be converted to probability distributions such that distances and similarities can be defined and computed. With this method, we conduct a diachronic analysis of the similarity between Weibo and PTT, providing a way to pinpoint when and how the topic similarity between the two rises or falls. A fine-grained view on the grammatical behavior and political implications is attempted, too. This study thus sheds light on alternative explainable routes for future social media listening method on the understanding of cross-strait relationship.
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