Bidirectional Topic Matching: Quantifying Thematic Intersections Between Climate Change and Climate Mitigation News Corpora Through Topic Modelling

Raven Adam, Marie Kogler


Abstract
Bidirectional Topic Matching (BTM) is a novel method for cross-corpus topic modeling that quantifies thematic overlap and divergence between corpora. BTM is a flexible framework that can incorporate various topic modeling approaches, including BERTopic, Top2Vec, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). It employs a dual-model approach, training separate topic models for each corpus and applying them reciprocally to enable comprehensive cross-corpus comparisons. This methodology facilitates the identification of shared themes and unique topics, providing nuanced insights into thematic relationships. A case study on climate news articles illustrates BTM’s utility by analyzing two distinct corpora: news coverage on climate change and articles focused on climate mitigation. The results reveal significant thematic overlaps and divergences, shedding light on how these two aspects of climate discourse are framed in the media.
Anthology ID:
2025.climatenlp-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Kalyan Dutia, Peter Henderson, Markus Leippold, Christoper Manning, Gaku Morio, Veruska Muccione, Jingwei Ni, Tobias Schimanski, Dominik Stammbach, Alok Singh, Alba (Ruiran) Su, Saeid A. Vaghefi
Venues:
ClimateNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
208–217
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.climatenlp-1.14/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raven Adam and Marie Kogler. 2025. Bidirectional Topic Matching: Quantifying Thematic Intersections Between Climate Change and Climate Mitigation News Corpora Through Topic Modelling. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2025), pages 208–217, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bidirectional Topic Matching: Quantifying Thematic Intersections Between Climate Change and Climate Mitigation News Corpora Through Topic Modelling (Adam & Kogler, ClimateNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.climatenlp-1.14.pdf