Topic Modeling as a Tool for Analyzing Library Chat Transcripts

Library chat services are an increasingly important communication channel to connect patrons to library resources and services. Analysis of chat transcripts could provide librarians with insights into improving services. Unfortunately, chat transcripts consist of unstructured text data, making it impractical for librarians to go beyond simple quantitative analysis (e.g., chat duration, message count, word frequencies) with existing tools. As a stepping-stone toward a more sophisticated chat transcript analysis tool, this study investigated the application of different types of topic modeling techniques to analyze one academic library’s chat reference data collected from April 10, 2015, to May 31, 2019, with the goal of extracting the most accurate and easily interpretable topics. In this study, topic accuracy and interpretability—the quality of topic outcomes—were quantitatively measured with topic coherence metrics. Additionally, qualitative accuracy and interpretability were measured by the librarian author of this paper depending on the subjective judgment on whether topics are aligned with frequently asked questions or easily inferable themes in academic library contexts. This study found that from a human’s qualitative evaluation, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) produced more accurate and interpretable topics, which is not necessarily aligned with the findings of the quantitative evaluation with all three types of topic coherence metrics. Interestingly, the commonly used technique Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) did not necessarily perform better than pLSA. Also, semi-supervised techniques with human-curated anchor words of Correlation Explanation (CorEx) or guided LDA (GuidedLDA) did not necessarily perform better than an unsupervised technique of Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (DMM). Last, the study found that using the entire transcript, including both sides of the interaction between the library patron and the librarian, performed better than using only the initial question asked by the library patron across different techniques in increasing the quality of topic outcomes.