Uncovering Water Research with Natural Language Processing

In order to address current water challenges, scientific research on water-related issues is crucial. However, traditional techniques for selecting research topics, such as literature reviews and expert opinions, can be time-consuming and may not provide a comprehensive overview of available information. We propose using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in this study to extract, align, and compare water research topics from different corpora. We apply these techniques to the research paper abstracts from the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (NMWRRI) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to assess these institutions’ current research interests and identify potential new research directions. We use a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model for topic extraction and a Word2Vec model for topic alignment. This study highlights the benefits of using NLP techniques to analyze trends and identify novel research directions in water studies.