Mining Dynamics of Research Topics Based on the Combined LDA and WordNet

A large volume of research documents are available online for us to access and analysis. It is very important to detect and mine the dynamics of the research topics from these large corpora. In this paper, we propose an improved method by introducing WordNet to LDA. This approach is to find latent topics of large corpora, and then we propose many methods to analyze the dynamics of those topics. We apply the methodology to two large document collections: 1940 papers from NIPS 00-13 (1987–2000) and 2074 papers from NIPS 14-23 (2001–2010). Six experiments are conducted on the two corpora and the experimental results show that our method is better than LDA in finding research topics and is feasible in discovering the dynamics of research topics.