Overview
Common Topics are the prominent words and phrases that arise most frequently in participant responses.
Included in this Article
How it Works
Remesh processes the language in participants’ responses before running them through a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that analyzes term frequencies to estimate their importance. This allows Remesh to surface potentially interesting topics that arise. If you're looking for a way to identify themes, we recommend looking at Auto Code or Thematic Clusters.
Locations and Best Practices
You can find Common Topics in the following spaces in the platform. Common Topics are available for Ask Opinion, Branching and Ask Experience questions.
Remesh Live
During a Live Conversation when looking at Ask Opinion or Branching questions you’ll see the word or phrase classified as the “Common Topic” along with the number of different responses that contain the Common Topic. Highlighted words in responses are Common Topics.
- Best Practices: Click the Common Topic to see the responses that contain that Common Topic. Use this in conjunction with the Percent Agree score to the right of each response to quickly surface what thoughts and ideas are most mentioned by participants and craft follow up questions.
Post Conversation Analysis: Results
Common Topics are accessible in the Post Conversation Analysis: Results space for Ask Opinion, Branching and Ask Experience Questions. You can find them by clicking the search bar or looking at the word cloud.
- Best Practices: Select Common Topics from the list to view just the responses that contain those Common Topics to read through responses within similar themes. Selecting Common Topics will also adjust your Word Cloud.
Post Conversation Analysis: Common Topics
In the Post Conversation Analysis space, click Tools on the top bar then Common Topics to access Common Topics for the entire conversation.
- Best Practices: Common Topics in the Tools space will show you Common Topics across all Ask Opinion, Branching and Ask Experience questions in your conversation. This can be used to get a wider picture of what topics were most prevalent throughout the conversation and surface opportunities to dig deeper question by question in Results or Auto Code.
Post Conversation Analysis: Search Topics
In the Post Conversation Analysis Space, click Tools on the top bar next to Results, then click Search Topics to access Common Topics at the Conversation-level.
- Best Practices: Search Topics enables you to analyze and understand key themes and topics from a Conversation-level including a word cloud containing common topics across all Ask Opinion, Branching and Ask Experience questions. You can read more about Search Topics here.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the actual algorithm that “Common Topics” uses?
The algorithm doesn’t simply count the number of times a word or phrase appears. Remesh currently uses a ranking algorithm called “Tf-idf” which stands for “term frequency-inverse document frequency”, and is used as a way to reflect how important a word is to a document. It works by increasing proportionally to the number of times a word appears in a response but is offset by the number of times that word appears in general.
So, words that are common in every response, such as “this”, “what”, and “if”, rank low even though they may appear many times since they don’t mean much in particular. Variations of the algorithm are often used by search engines as a way to rank and score a document’s relevance to a user’s query. In this case, document = a single participant’s response.