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Automating Historical Insight Extraction from Large-Scale Newspaper Archives via Neural Topic Modeling

arXiv 2512.11635 ↗First posted 12 Dec 2025cs.CL cs.AI cs.IRcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Extracting coherent and human-understandable themes from large collections of unstructured historical newspaper archives presents significant challenges due to topic evolution, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) noise, and the sheer volume of text. Traditional topic-modeling methods, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), often fall short in capturing the complexity and dynamic nature of discourse in historical texts. To address these limitations, we employ BERTopic. This neural topic-modeling approach leverages transformerbased embeddings to extract and classify topics, which, despite its growing popularity, still remains underused in historical research. Our study focuses on articles published between 1955 and 2018, specifically examining discourse on nuclear power and nuclear safety. We analyze various topic distributions across the corpus and trace their temporal evolution to uncover long-term trends and shifts in public discourse. This enables us to more accurately explore patterns in public discourse, including the co-occurrence of themes related to nuclear power and nuclear weapons and their shifts in topic importance over time. Our study demonstrates the scalability and contextual sensitivity of BERTopic as an alternative to traditional approaches, offering richer insights into historical discourses extracted from newspaper archives. These findings contribute to historical, nuclear, and social-science research while reflecting on current limitations and proposing potential directions for future work.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

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References · 23

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
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11 more
  1. 2013Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysiscited by 63
  2. 2015A deep matrix factorization method for learning attribute representationscited by 24
  3. 2016Mixing Dirichlet Topic Models and Word Embeddings to Make lda2veccited by 19
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  5. 2021Integrating topic modeling and word embedding to characterize violent deathscited by 8
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  8. 2024Multilingual transformer and BERTopic for short text topic modeling: The case of Serbiancited by 6
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  10. 2025BERTopic for Topic Modeling of Hindi Short Texts: A Comparative Studycited by 3
  11. 2024Historia Magistra Vitae: Dynamic Topic Modeling of Roman Literature using Neural Embeddingscited by 1

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