The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), an Institute within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently funded a research categorization tool that uses Topic Modeling to perform text-based categorization of NIH grants, and a large scale graphing algorithm to display these them on a map organized spatially into their best-fit categories. This interactive tool is available to the public at www.nihmaps.org/. The Institute has enlisted the services of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL) at the University of Massachusetts In order to enhance this tool and further develop the topic modeling method, the to perform topic modeling of NIH grants. IESL is well-known as a center of innovation for topic modeling: research contributions include both advances in scalability, such as the first reported model to run on a corpus of more than one billion words, and modeling advances, such as the introduction of models that combine topic modeling approaches with time series analysis tools and regression models. The specific goal of this portion of the project is to develop a Java-based web application to support evaluation of topics by experts.
