Presentation for the NYU Politics Data Lab December 2015
This is a "Very Applied" introduction to Topic Models in the social sciences. I introduce the concepts underlying topic models, discuss common pitfalls in their application, and present seminal research using topic models in Political Scinece.
I also provide a hands-on walkthrough of the most famous and widely-used topic model (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) as well as an exciting extension of LDA that's often better suited to answering the kinds of questions that political scientists tend to ask (Structural Topic Model).