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Virginia Tech

TimeLink: Visualizing Diachronic Word Embeddings and Topics

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The task of analyzing a collection of documents generated over time is daunting. A natural way to ease the task is by summarizing documents into the topics that exist within these documents. The temporal aspect of topics can frame relevance based on when topics are introduced and when topics stop being mentioned. It creates trends and patterns that can be traced by individual key terms taken from the corpus. If trends are being established, there must be a way to visualize them through the key terms. Creating a visual system to support this analysis can help users quickly gain insights from the data, significantly easing the burden from the original analysis technique. However, creating a visual system for terms is not easy. Work has been done to develop word embeddings, allowing researchers to treat words like any number. This makes it possible to create simple charts based on word embeddings like scatter plots. However, these methods are inefficient due to loss of effectiveness with multiple time slices and point overlap. A visualization method that addresses these problems while also visualizing diachronic word embeddings in an interesting way with added semantic meaning is hard to find. These problems are managed through TimeLink. TimeLink is proposed as a dashboard system to help users gain insights from the movement of diachronic word embeddings. It comprises a Sankey diagram showing the path of a selected key term to a cluster in a time period. This local cluster is also mapped to a global topic based on an original corpus of documents from which the key terms are drawn. On the dashboard, different tools are given to users to aid in a focused analysis, such as filtering key terms and emphasizing specific clusters. TimeLink provides insightful visualizations focused on temporal word embeddings while maintaining the insights provided by global topic evolution, advancing our understanding of how topics evolve over time.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science & Applications
Department dc:contributor.department
Computer Science and#38; Applications
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2024

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Williams, Lemara Faith
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • North, Christopher L.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Danielson, Thomas Lee
  • Mayer, Brian Benjamin
  • Chen, Yan
  • Faust, Rebecca Jane

Subjects

dc:subject × 4

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright
Language dc:language.iso
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:40950
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/119395

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Williams, Lemara Faith. TimeLink: Visualizing Diachronic Word Embeddings and Topics. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2024. https://hdl.handle.net/10919/119395