topicexplorer 1.0b60

InPhO Topic Explorer

This interactive visualization displays information from the LDA topic models generated using the InPhO VSM module. Live demos trained on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a selection of books from the HathiTrust Digital Library, and the original LDA training set of Associated Press articles are available at http://inphodata.cogs.indiana.edu.

The color bands within each article’s row show the topic distribution within that article, and the relative sizes of each band indicates the weight of that topic in the article. The total width of each row indicates similarity to the focal topic or document, measured by the quantity sim(doc) = 1 – JSD(doc, focus entity), where JSD is the Jensen-Shannon distance between the word probability distributions of each item. Each topic’s label and color is arbitrarily assigned, but is consistent across articles in the browser.

Display options include topic normalization, alphabetical sort and topic sort. By normalizing topics, the combined width of each bar expands so that topic weights per document can be compared. By clicking a topic, the documents will reorder acoording to that topic’s weight and topic bars will reorder according to the topic weights in the highest weighted document. When a topic is selected, clicking “Top Documents for [Topic]” will take you to a new page showing the most similar documents to that topic’s word distribution. The original sort order can be restored with the “Reset Topic Sort” button.

Installation

There are two types of install: Default and Developer.

Default Install

1. Install the Anaconda Python 2.7 Distribution.

2. Open a terminal and run pip install --pre topicexplorer.

3. Test installation by typing vsm -h to print usage instructions.

Developer Install

1. Set up Git

2. Install the Anaconda Python 2.7 Distribution.

3. Open a terminal and run pip install --src . -e git+https://github.com/inpho/topic-explorer#egg=topicexplorer

4. Test installation by typing vsm -h to print usage instructions.

Usage

Workflow

1. Initialize the Topic Explorer on a file, folder of text files, or folder of folders:

   vsm init PATH [CONFIG]

   This will generate a configuration file called CONFIG.

2. Train LDA models using the on-screen instructions:

   vsm train CONFIG

3. Launch the topic explorer:

   vsm launch CONFIG

4. Press Ctrl+C to quit all servers.

See the sample configuration files in the config directory for examples of how to extend the topic explorer.

Bug Reports

Please report issues on the issue tracker or contact Jaimie directly (contact info at bottom of README).

In your report, please include the error message, the command you ran, your operating system, and the output of the command vsm --version. This will ensure that we can quickly diagnose your issue.

Note: When using a developer install vsm --version will print in the following format: 1.0b39-1-g7c834bf-dirty. * The first part is the most recent release tag. (1.0b39) * The second part is the number of commits since the tag. (1) * The next is the hash of the most recent commit. (g7c834bf) * The optional -dirty flag indicates that the local repository has uncommitted changes.

Alternate Installs

We highly recommend using the Anaconda Python 2.7 Distribution. Straightforward instructions are provided above for Anaconda Python 2.7 for both end users and developers. Both of these installs are officially supported.

Below we offer guidance for installing side-by-side with an Anaconda Python 3.5 install or for installing it without Anaconda, with notes on dependencies.

Python 3 Install

The InPhO Topic Explorer is only compatible with Python 2.7. However, Anaconda for Python 3.5 makes it easy to set up a side-by-side install of Python 2.7 so you can use both Python 3.5 and Python 2.7.

1. Install the Anaconda Python 3.5 Distribution.

2. Open a terminal and run conda create -n py27 python=2.7 anaconda. This will create a Python 2.7 Anaconda environment.

3. Run source activate py27 to activate the Python 2.7 bindings. You should see (py27) before your prompt.

4. Use either the Default or Developer install instructions, skipping the step to install Anaconda Python 2.7.

5. Run source deactivate to deactivate Python 2.7 bindings and reactivate Python 3.5 bindings. Note that the vsm command will only work when the Python 2.7 bindings are activated.

Non-Anaconda Install

• Miniconda

1. If using Miniconda (a small version of Anaconda), the necessary packages are: conda install numpy scipy nltk matplotplib ipython networkx

• Debian/Ubuntu

1. sudo apt-get-install build-essential python-dev python-pip python-numpy python-matplotlib python-scipy python-ipython

2. IPython Notebooks

• Windows

1. Install Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7

2. Install the Python packages below:

   • Numpy

   • Scipy

   • matplotlib

   • IPython Notebooks

Licensing and Attribution

The project is released under an Open-Source Initiative-approved MIT License.

The InPhO Topic Explorer may be cited as:

• Jaimie Murdock and Colin Allen. (2015) Visualization Techniques for Topic Model Checking in Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15). Austin, Texas, USA, January 25-29, 2015. http://inphodata.cogs.indiana.edu/

A BibTeX file is included in the repository for easier attribution.

Collaboration and Maintenance

The InPhO Topic Explorer is maintained by Jaimie Murdock:

• E-mail: [e-mail]

• Twitter: [@JaimieMurdock](http://twitter.com/JaimieMurdock)

• GitHub: [@JaimieMurdock](http://github.com/JaimieMurdock)

• Homepage: http://jamram.net/

Please report issues on the issue tracker or contact Jaimie directly.

We are open to collaboration! If there’s a feature you’d like to see implemented, please contact us and we can lend advice and technical assistance.