Hot Topics: Topic Modeling of Latin Text

Topic modeling is a method of statistically identifying abstract topics that are present throughout a set of documents by grouping together words in those documents that are related. For our Computer Science Comps, several members of the Carleton College History department asked us to create a topic modeling algorithm that would work on Latin texts. Our project has two parts: the algorithm and the application. The algorithm runs topic modeling on any Latin or English corpus, and allows the user a great deal of freedom in building a model using parameters that are appropriate to their corpus. The application allows the user to explore the results of that algorithm in the context of the corpus through several different data visualization tools