Discovering topics and trends in the field of Artificial Intelligence: Using LDA topic modeling

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has affected all aspects of social life in recent years. This study reviews 177,204 documents published in 25 journals and 16 conferences in the AI research from 1990 to 2021, and applies the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to extract the 40 topics from the abstracts. According to the topics obtained, 7 subfields of the AI field can be discovered: Approximate Reasoning, Computational Theory, Intelligent Automation, Artificial Neural Network, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. This study aggregates the results of the LDA model from the perspectives of year, publication source, and country/region. The aggregated result is the topic distribution from different perspectives. Analysis of the aggregated results reveals the research characteristics of different publication sources (countries/regions) in the AI research, and which publication sources (countries/regions) have similar research content. These results provide help for scholars and research institutions to choose research directions, and new entrants to understand the dynamics of the field.