A Comparison on the Use of LSA and LDA in Psychology Analysis on “Courage” Definitions

Abstract

In the present work Latent Semantic Analysis of textual data was applied on texts related to courage, in order to compare and contrast results and evaluate the opportunity of integrating different data sets. To better understand the definition of courage in Italian context, 1199 participants were involved in the present study and was asked to answer to the following question “Courage is[Formula: see text]”. The participants’ definitions of courage were analyzed with the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), in order to study the fundamental concepts arising from the population. An analogous comparison with Twitter posts has been also carried out to analyze if the public opinion emerging from social media provides a challenging and rich context to explore computational models of natural language.