Exploring the evolution of research topics during the COVID-19 pandemic
Francesco Invernici Anna Bernasconi Stefano Ceri
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the research agendas of most scientific
communities, resulting in an overwhelming production of research articles in a
variety of domains, including medicine, virology, epidemiology, economy,
psychology, and so on. Several open-access corpora and literature hubs were
established; among them, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) has
systematically gathered scientific contributions for 2.5 years, by collecting
and indexing over one million articles. Here, we present the CORD-19 Topic
Visualizer (CORToViz), a method and associated visualization tool for
inspecting the CORD-19 textual corpus of scientific abstracts. Our method is
based upon a careful selection of up-to-date technologies (including large
language models), resulting in an architecture for clustering articles along
orthogonal dimensions and extraction techniques for temporal topic mining.
Topic inspection is supported by an interactive dashboard, providing fast,
one-click visualization of topic contents as word clouds and topic trends as
time series, equipped with easy-to-drive statistical testing for analyzing the
significance of topic emergence along arbitrarily selected time windows. The
processes of data preparation and results visualization are completely general
and virtually applicable to any corpus of textual documents - thus suited for
effective adaptation to other contexts.