The World of Topic Modeling in R

Abstract

This software review provides a systematic overview of R packages for topic modeling. These packages facilitate the application of computational text analysis to conduct research compatible with a wide variety of methodological frameworks employed in the social and communication sciences. For this overview, the analysis process is divided into four steps: preprocessing, inference, evaluation, and interpretation of topic models. The summary shows that the wide selection of R packages available today provides easy-to-use access to this increasingly popular computational social science method and contributes to its methodical standardization.