Insights into the French socio-ecological research network through Natural Language Processing

Ingrid Falk (1) , Isabelle Charpentier (1, 2)

1 LTSER-FR ZAEU - LTSER-FR Zone Atelier Enviironnementale Urbaine
2 ICube - Laboratoire des sciences de l'ingénieur, de l'informatique et de l'imagerie

The French long term socio-ecological research network RZA (Réseau des Zones Atelier) promotes inter-and trans-disciplinary research on essential socio-ecological systems (SESs). Scientic research on SESs has grown exponentially since the seventies, but because of the heterogeneity in the actors, the disciplines and the collected data some eorts are still necessary to build a common language and, in the next future, a thesaurus for indexing data. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to analyse a French corpus derived from the 5th colloquium of the RZA which marked the network's 20th anniversary. Using the topic modelling technique we show how these methods allowed us to gain insights about the current status of research within the RZA community. We investigate the involved vocabulary to cross reference the subjects of interest and explore how well these automatically extracted topics are related to the ambitions of the RZA community in terms of inter-and trans-disciplinary environmental research.

Mots clés: Natural language processing (NLP); topic modelling; socio-ecological system (SES); Réseau des Zones Ateliers (RZA)

Domaines: Environnement et Société

Ingrid Falk, Isabelle Charpentier. Insights into the French socio-ecological research network through Natural Language Processing. 2021. ⟨hal-03334795⟩