BERT-based Topic Modeling Approach for Malaria Research Publication

Abstract

Malaria is a communicable disease with half of the global population at risk due to its high morbidity and mortality rates. A massive number of studies are dedicated to malaria research, so it plays a key role in formulating the proper prevention strategy and effective malaria treatment. With the overwhelming number of updated publications in the field, an unsupervised text mining approach such as topic modeling may provide an alternative method for the malaria researcher to keep pace with new insights. In this work, we collect metadata of malaria publications from the PubMed database to perform BERT-based topic modeling to find well-defined topics regarding malaria research. The method is largely based on the popular BERTopic pipeline. We compare the performance of three different language models to generate document embeddings from the data. The dimension reduction and the density-based clustering algorithm are used to cluster the embeddings. The topic representation is computed based on the semantic similarity of the class TF-IDF representation. The substance of the resulting topics is then manually annotated based on the top words of each topic. We demonstrate that by merging initial topics into larger topics using hierarchical clustering and manual content-based examination, the evaluated coherence measure can be further improved, thus enhancing the topic's interpretability. Our modeling result is able to extract ten major topics recurring in the malaria research publication published from 2017–2022. The result provides preliminary insight to understand the dynamics and patterns of malaria research over the years

Topics & Concepts