Analyzing Topics of JUUL Discussions on Social Media Using a Semantics-assisted NMF model

JUUL has become a widely used brand of e-cigarettes which takes more than 70% of the market. Social media provides a popular platform for users to discuss the preference and perceptions of JUUL. The discussions are valuable for real-time monitoring of JUUL use. Current research on topic analysis of JUUL discussions mainly relies on human work, which takes much time and effort. This paper adopts a Semantics-assisted NMF topic analysis model to automatically discover topics from JUUL-related short posts on Reddit. By successfully merging the semantic relationships into traditional NMF, this model outperforms in discovering topics with keywords that are important but have a lower word frequency among the posts. Experimental results show the potential of this model in JUUL surveillance and control practice.