Evaluating BERTopic on Open-Ended Data: A Case Study with Belgian Dutch Daily Narratives
PositiveArtificial Intelligence
The evaluation of BERTopic on a corpus of nearly 25,000 daily personal narratives written in Belgian-Dutch (Flemish) sheds light on the challenges of topic modeling in culturally specific contexts. While traditional methods like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) performed well on automated coherence metrics, human evaluations indicated that BERTopic consistently identified the most coherent and culturally relevant topics. This discrepancy underscores the limitations of purely statistical approaches in narrative-rich data. Additionally, the diminished performance of KMeans compared to previous studies on similar Dutch corpora highlights the unique linguistic challenges faced in personal narrative analysis. The findings emphasize the critical role of contextual embeddings in robust topic modeling and advocate for a human-centered evaluation approach, particularly when dealing with low-resource languages and culturally specific domains.
— via World Pulse Now AI Editorial System