Utilizing BERTopic modeling for concept discovery in the domain of gerotranscendence and solitude
B. Damayanthi Jesudas, Finn Wilson, Rachel A. Mavrovich, Sean Kindya, Feng-Yu Yeh, Sam Smith, Jeremy Ravenel, Jie Zheng, Yongqun He, Hollen N. Reischer, Julie C. Bowker, John Beverley, William D. Duncan · 2026
Read Utilizing BERTopic modeling for concept discovery in the domain of gerotranscendence and solitude by B. Damayanthi Jesudas, Finn Wilson, Rachel A. Mavrovich, Sean Kindya, Feng-Yu Yeh, Sam Smith, Jeremy Ravenel, Jie Zheng, Yongqun He, Hollen N. Reischer, Julie C. Bowker, John Beverley, William D. Duncan (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13536857.txt.
Description
Damayanthi Jesudas and co-authors let an algorithm draft the first map of two scholarly fields, solitude and positive aging, to speed up ontology building. Their 2026 study applies BERTopic modeling to two handbooks, one on solitude research and one on gerotranscendence theory. Ontologies normally grow through slow expert collaboration.
Two pipelines, a default and a custom one with grammar filtering and phrase tuning, extracted topics and keywords from each book. Human experts then pruned hundreds of raw topics down to a few dozen quality concepts. Semantic matching linked overlapping topics across the two domains into a merged framework. The survivors feed a healthy-aging ontology. The authors are candid that the machine proposes and experts dispose. Even so, halving the blank-page phase, while surfacing concepts manual review might miss, changes how such reference structures get built.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | B. Damayanthi Jesudas, Finn Wilson, Rachel A. Mavrovich, Sean Kindya, Feng-Yu Yeh, Sam Smith, Jeremy Ravenel, Jie Zheng, Yongqun He, Hollen N. Reischer, Julie C. Bowker, John Beverley, William D. Duncan |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 95 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |