Network-based Trajectory Analysis of Topic Interaction Map for Text Mining of COVID-19 Biomedical Literature

Since the emergence of the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, relevant research has been published at a dazzling pace, which makes it hard to follow the research in this area without dedicated efforts. It is practically impossible to implement this task manually due to the high volume of the relevant literature. Text mining has been considered to be a powerful approach to address this challenge, especially the topic modeling, a well-known unsupervised method that aims to reveal latent topics from the literature. However, in spite of its potential utility, the results generated from this approach are often investigated manually. Hence, its application to the COVID-19 literature is not straightforward and expert knowledge is needed to make meaningful interpretations. In order to address these challenges, we propose a novel analytical framework for estimating topic interactions and effective visualization for topic interpretation. Here we assumed that topics constituting a paper can be positioned on an interaction map, which belongs to a high-dimensional Euclidean space. Based on this assumption, after summarizing topics with their topic-word distributions using the biterm topic model, we mapped these latent topics on networks to visualize relationships among the topics. Moreover, in the proposed approach, we developed a score that is helpful to select meaningful words that characterize the topic. We interpret the relationships among topics by tracking the change of relationships among topics using a trajectory plot generated with different levels of word richness. These results together provide deeply mined and intuitive representation of relationships among topics related to a specific research area. The application of this proposed framework to the PubMed literature shows that our approach facilitates understanding of the topics constituting the COVID-19 knowledge.