Understanding Socially Constructed Concepts Using Blogs Data

In this paper we propose a methodology to understand complex concepts, and which captures aspects of the contextual—and collaboratively constructed—meaning of these concepts with considerably less effort than manual coding. We use the word “quality” as one such concept to exemplify our methodology. By using unsupervised topic models along with a small corpus of human labeled data we explore the different uses of the concept “quality” in a large number of blogs. Our methodology is validated, qualitatively, by comparing our results to previous research. Finally, we note limitations and future directions of this work.