The sensemaking process of large sets of text documents is highly challenging for tasks such as obtaining a comprehensive overview or keeping up with the most important trends and topics. Even though several established methods for condensation and summarization of large text corpora exist, many of them lack the ability to account for difference in prevalence between identified topics, which in turn impedes quantitative analysis. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel prevalence-aware method for topic extraction, and show how it can be used to obtain important insights from two text corpora with very different content. We also implemented a prototype visual analytics tool which guides the user in the search for relevant insights and promotes trust in the yielded results. We have verified our application by a user study, as well as by a validation run on a data set with previously known topic structure. The results clearly show that our approach is suitable for text mining, that is can be used by non-experts, and that it offers features which makes it an interesting candidate for use in several different analyze scenarios.
This work was partially supported through the ELLIIT environment for strategic research in Sweden. The work of Ilir Jusufi was supported in part by the Knowledge Foundation, Sweden, through the project ”Rekryteringar 21, Universitetslektor i spelteknik” under Contract 20210077.