Thematic Categorization on Pineapple Production in Costa Rica: An Exploratory Analysis through Topic Modeling

Costa Rica is one of the largest producers and exporters of pineapple in the world. This status has encouraged multinational companies to use plantations in this Central American country for experimentation and the cultivation of new varieties, such as the Pinkglow pineapple. However, pineapple monoculture has significant socio-environmental impacts on the regions where it is cultivated.In this exploratory study, we aimed to analyze how pineapple production is portrayed on the Internet. To achieve this, we collected a corpus of texts in Spanish and English from online sources in two phases: using the BootCat tool and manual search on newspaper websites. The Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) topic model was then applied to identify dominant topics within the corpus. These topics were subsequently classified into thematic categories, and the texts were categorized accordingly. The findings indicate that environmental issues related to pineapple cultivation are underrepresented on the Internet, particularly in comparison to the extensive focus on topics related to pineapple production and marketing.