‘What is this corpus about?’: using topic modelling to explore a specialised corpus

This paper introduces topic modelling, a machine learning technique that automatically identifies ‘topics’ in a given corpus. The paper illustrates its use in the exploration of a corpus of academic English. It first offers the intuitive explanation of the underlying mechanism of topic modelling and describes the procedure for building a model, including the decisions involved in the model-building process. The paper then explores the model. A...