Integrating word embedding and topic modeling for sentiment analysis: A case study on the social mood on economy

Abstract

In recent years, textual analysis and embedding spaces have become essential and complementary tools for sentiment analysis in National Statistics Institutes’ research, owing to their ability to summarize discussed topics effectively. Istat has developed an innovative tool, wordembox, which allows external users to explore the outputs of popular word embedding algorithms, such as Word2Vec and FastText. This tool enriches the analysis with a novel graph functionality, enabling users to discover clusters of words and facilitating implicit topic modeling. This article focuses on Social Mood on Economy (SME) posts over a period in which the index recorded a strong downward trend: the first month of the Russia-Ukraine conflict at the beginning of 2022. We compare findings from wordembox with standard topic modeling techniques, including Bayesian Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Top2Vec, and BERTopic, recent methods that extract clusters from word embedding spaces. These techniques show coherent results, and their combined use in textual analysis may create a synergy that enhances the informative content of synthetic indexes such as ‘Social Mood on Economy Index (SMEI)’.