Topics may Evolve: Using Complaint Data for Analysis

User complaint data are quite valuable because they can reflect deficiencies of companies. Analyzing these short texts can help companies discover what topics users are complaining about. It is critical to locate and respond to these complaints timely so that companies can improve users’ satisfaction and loyalty. As the data volume is large, topic model can help discover key complaint topics quickly. The complaint data are in the form of short texts and streams, traditional topic models like LDA and BTM are not suitable in this scenario, for the reason that LDA is designed for long texts and BTM can not handle streams. This paper firstly proposes an improved shorttext topic model called PMITI-BTM to generate topics from user complaint data statically, and then further extends this algorithm into a dynamic one to suit the streaming feature of data. To further analyze the topic evolution, we finally propose a clustering algorithm called TDWAP to acquire the evolution process of these topics in different time slices. For each algorithm, we do several experiments to prove its efficiency. Results show that our methods not only can improve the performance of short texts topic discovery, but also can discover the evolution of topics.