Exploratory Study of Developing a Synchronization-Based Approach for Multi-step Discovery of Knowledge Structures

Abstract

As Topic Modeling has been applied in increasingly various domains, the difficulty in naming and characterizing topics also has been recognized more. This study, therefore, explores an approach of combining text mining with network analysis in a multi-step approach. The concept of synchronization was applied to re-assign the top author keywords in more than one topic category, in order to improve the visibility of the topic-author keyword network, and to increase the topical cohesion in each topic. The suggested approach was applied using 16,548 articles with 2,881 unique author keywords in construction and building engineering indexed by KSCI. As a result, it was revealed that the combined approach could improve both the visibility of the topic-author keyword map and topical cohesion in most of the detected topic categories. There should be more cases of applying the approach in various domains for generalization and advancement of the approach. Also, more sophisticated evaluation methods should also be necessary to develop the suggested approach.