Welcome to the Party

Abstract

Modeling topic distributions over documents has become a recent method for coping with the problematic of huge amounts of unstructured data. Especially in the context of Web communities, topic models can capture the zeitgeist as a snapshot of people's communication. However, the problem that arises from that static snapshot is that it fails to capture the dynamics of a community. To cope with this problem, dynamic topic models were introduced. This chapter makes use of those topic models in order to capture dynamics in user behavior within microblog communities such as Twitter. However, only applying topic models yields no interpretable results, so a method is proposed that compares different political parties over time using regression models based on DTM output. For evaluation purposes, a Twitter data set divided into different political communities is analyzed and results and findings are presented.