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Topical analysis in Relative Insight

Learn about the topics analyzed in Relative Insight, how topical analysis is done and how you can rename or relabel topics in a project.

Trish Pencarska avatar
Written by Trish Pencarska
Updated over a year ago

When analyzing a comparison, Relative Insight identifies differences, frequencies and similarities across topics, phrases, words, emotions and grammar.

This article covers the important things to know about topical analysis:

What is a topic?

A topic is a classification under which words are grouped, based on a shared theme or mental concept.

For example, the topic 'Building components' contains words such as room, floor, ceiling, and many other similar words.

What topics can Relative Insight identify?

Relative Insight uses a topic hierarchy that consists of 21 top-level categories and over 420 sub-categories that cover a broad range of tangible and commercially relevant domains.

The 21 top-level categories are:

  • General and abstract terms

  • Health, the body and the individual

  • Arts and crafts

  • Emotion

  • Food and drink

  • Government and public

  • Architecture and housing

  • Money and commerce

  • Entertainment and sport

  • Life and living things

  • Movement, location and transportation

  • Numbers and measurement

  • Substances and materials

  • Education

  • Language and communication

  • Socialisation

  • Time

  • The physical world

  • Psychological states

  • Science and technology

  • Names, grammar and other

We also have a complete list of topics available as a downloadable resource, which details all 420 sub-categories.

Download here

How are topics identified?

Words are imprecise and can take on different meanings in different contexts. Consider the word 'spring' that can be used as a verb, a season, a mechanical component or a body of water. This underscores the importance of analyzing text in a way that considers not just a specific linguistic feature but also the words and phrases that surround it.

Relative Insight does this through a combination of predefined classifications and machine learning that enables the platform to make informed judgments about the topic(s) present in a text.

Renaming topics

When exploring the results of a comparison, you can choose to rename topics. Any changes will be reflected on any insight cards where the particular topic(s) are present.

Changes to topic names are contained within the particular project you are working on, they do not carry over to other projects in which the topic is surfaced.

  1. When viewing Topics in Explore, click on the three-dot icon and select 'Edit Topic name'

  2. Enter your preferred label, click 'Save' and then 'Okay.'

Use Custom Themes to define your own topic categories and add your domain expertise on top of our AI-generated topics for more accurate analysis.

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