Is BERTopic Better than PLSA for Extracting Key Topics in Aviation Safety Reports?

This study compares the effectiveness of BERTopic and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) in extracting meaningful topics from aviation safety reports aiming to enhance the understanding of patterns in aviation incident data. Using a dataset of over 36,000 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports from 2000–2020, BERTopic employed transformer-based embeddings and hierarchical clustering, while PLSA utilized probabilistic modelling through the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Results showed that BERTopic outperformed PLSA in topic coherence, achieving a C_v score of 0.41 compared to PLSA's 0.37, while also demonstrating superior interpretability as validated by aviation safety experts. These findings underscore the advantages of modern transformer-based approaches in analyzing complex aviation datasets, paving the way for enhanced insights and informed decision-making in aviation safety. Future work will explore hybrid models, multilingual datasets, and advanced clustering techniques to further improve topic modelling in this domain.