Recent research in opinion mining proposed word embedding-based topic modeling methods that provide superior coherence compared to traditional topic modeling. In this paper, we demonstrate how these methods can be used to display correlated topic models on social media texts using SocialVisTUM, our proposed interactive visualization toolkit. It displays a graph with topics as nodes and their correlations as edges. Further details are displayed interactively to support the exploration of large text collections, e.g., representative words and sentences of topics, topic and sentiment distributions, hierarchical topic clustering, and customizable, predefined topic labels. The toolkit optimizes automatically on custom data for optimal coherence. We show a working instance of the toolkit on data crawled from English social media discussions about organic food consumption. The visualization confirms findings of a qualitative consumer research study. SocialVisTUM and its training procedures are accessible online.

A major challenge in modern neural networks is the utilization of previous knowledge for new tasks in an effective manner, otherwise known as transfer learning. Fine-tuning, the most widely used method for achieving this, suffers from catastrophic forgetting. The problem is often exacerbated in natural language processing (NLP). In this work, we assess progressive neural networks (PNNs) as an alternative to fine-tuning. The evaluation is based on common NLP tasks such as sequence labeling and text classification. By gauging PNNs across a range of architectures, datasets, and tasks, we observe improvements over the baselines throughout all experiments.