Carnegie Mellon University
Browse
1/1
2 files

Automated Chat Transcript Analysis Using Topic Modeling for Library Reference Services

conference contribution
posted on 2019-10-31, 13:21 authored by Huajin WangHuajin Wang, Xiaoju (Julie) ChenXiaoju (Julie) Chen

Chat reference service has been used in academic libraries to more efficiently serve patrons in the digital age. Identifying question topics on chat can help librarians understand patrons’ needs and improve reference services. Researchers have used qualitative methods to understand question types in chat records; however, these methods are inefficient to analyze large chat datasets. Here, we conducted a novel research using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to automatically extract topics from chat transcripts generated in 5 years from a large university library. With little human intervention, the model identified major topics based on statistical distributions of terms- document relationships in chat transcripts. We also applied VOSviewer to analyze the same dataset and found consistent results. From these results, we found that the most prominent chat topics were about accessing various library resources. This finding can help libraries allocate resources, design educational materials, and provide trainings for future librarians.

History

Publisher Statement

82nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology | Melbourne, Australia | 19–23 October, 2019. Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license DOI: 10.1002/pra2.00031

Date

2019-10-18

Usage metrics

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC