Quantification of Overlapping and Network Complexity in News: Assessment of Top2Vec and Fuzzy Topic Models

Topic modeling in digital news faces the dual challenge of thematic overlap and evolving semantic boundaries, especially in morphologically rich languages like Turkish. To address these obstacles, we propose a topic modeling framework enhanced with knowledge graphs that explicitly incorporates uncertainty in topic assignment. We focus on the diversity of Fuzzy Latent Semantic Analysis (FLSA) and compare the performance with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and embedding-based Top2Vec on a corpus drawn from two Turkish news agencies. We evaluate each model using standard metrics for topic coherence, diversity, and interpretability. We propose Shannon entropy of node-degree distributions to measure the network complexity of knowledge graphs as topic similarity. Our results indicate that FLSA achieves perfect topic diversity, 1.000 and improved interpretability, 0.33 over LDA, 0.09 while also enhancing coherence, 0.33 vs. 0.27. Top2Vec demonstrates the strongest coherence, 0.81 and interpretability, 0.78 with high diversity, 0.97, reflecting its capacity to form semantically cohesive clusters. Entropy analysis further shows that FLSA produces the most information-rich topic networks. These findings suggest that fuzzy modeling and embedding-based approaches offer complementary strengths, uncertainty-aware flexibility, and semantic precision, thereby improving topic discovery in complex, unstructured news environments.

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Publication Details

Journal
Applied Sciences
Published
2025-09-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app15179627
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Complex Network Analysis Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
1.32

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article

Quantification of Overlapping and Network Complexity in News: Assessment of Top2Vec and Fuzzy Topic Models

Musa Şervan Şahin, İsmail Burak Parlak, Salah Bourennane, Tankut Acarman et al.
1 citations
Applied Sciences
Complex Network Analysis Techniques
1.32
article

Quantification of Overlapping and Network Complexity in News: Assessment of Top2Vec and Fuzzy Topic Models

Musa Şervan Şahin, İsmail Burak Parlak, Salah Bourennane, Tankut Acarman, Mouloud Adel
article en
1 citations

Abstract

Topic modeling in digital news faces the dual challenge of thematic overlap and evolving semantic boundaries, especially in morphologically rich languages like Turkish. To address these obstacles, we propose a topic modeling framework enhanced with knowledge graphs that explicitly incorporates uncertainty in topic assignment. We focus on the diversity of Fuzzy Latent Semantic Analysis (FLSA) and compare the performance with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and embedding-based Top2Vec on a corpus drawn from two Turkish news agencies. We evaluate each model using standard metrics for topic coherence, diversity, and interpretability. We propose Shannon entropy of node-degree distributions to measure the network complexity of knowledge graphs as topic similarity. Our results indicate that FLSA achieves perfect topic diversity, 1.000 and improved interpretability, 0.33 over LDA, 0.09 while also enhancing coherence, 0.33 vs. 0.27. Top2Vec demonstrates the strongest coherence, 0.81 and interpretability, 0.78 with high diversity, 0.97, reflecting its capacity to form semantically cohesive clusters. Entropy analysis further shows that FLSA produces the most information-rich topic networks. These findings suggest that fuzzy modeling and embedding-based approaches offer complementary strengths, uncertainty-aware flexibility, and semantic precision, thereby improving topic discovery in complex, unstructured news environments.

Applied SciencesVol. 15(17)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR), Aix-Marseille Université (FR), Institut Fresnel (FR), Centrale Méditerranée (FR), Galatasaray University (TR)
Galatasaray Üniversitesi
Openalex Percentile: Top 16%
Complex Network Analysis Techniques
1.32
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