Welcome to TopEx!

TopEx is a domain agnostic NLP application that facilitates the exploration of topics and keywords in a set of texts. Programming/NLP knowledge is not required!

Start Exploring

Choose your access:

To get started with TopEx you can follow the Quick Start Guide, one of our TopEx Tutorials, or read the detailed User’s Manual.

Quick Start Guide

This guide is meant to get users up and running with TopEx quickly using BASIC parameters. All other parameters are left at their default settings. It is recommended when changing other parameters the user should have a basic knowledge of NLP concepts and consult the detailed TopEx User’s Manual.

Tutorials

Exploring COVID-19 pandemic tweets.

In this tutorial you will import a sample of Tweets from 2020 that are discussing the COVID-19 pandemic and will compare the topics discussed in March versus December.

Demo Videos and Presentations

TopEx Demo

BioCreative VII Challenge TopEx Presentation

User’s Manual

The Users Manual contains detailed descriptions of all options avaliable in TopEx, including installation instructions for running TopEx locally.

Support

For support with TopEx please submit an issue on the TopExApp GitHub page.

Acknowledgements

TopExApp (previously MedTop) was initially developed as a web app through the 2019-2020 CapStone program by Seniors in VCU’s Computer Science Department under the supervision of Dr. Bridget McInnes and Ms. Amy Olex. We wish to thank Sean Kotrola, Aidan Myers, and Suzanne Prince for their excellent work in getting this application up and running! Here are links to the team’s CapStone Poster and Application Demonstration.

In addition, Evan French and Peter Burdette from VCU’s Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research Informatics Core have been working tirelessly with Amy Olex to get TopEx ready for public release. Thanks to both of you for your amazing work!

Citation

If you use TopExApp in your research, please cite:

Olex A, DiazGranados D, McInnes BT, and Goldberg S. Local Topic Mining for Reflective Medical Writing. Full Length Paper. AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc 2020;2020:459–68. PMCID: PMC7233034

Olex, A.L., French, E., Burdette, P., Sagiraju, S., Neumann, T., Gal, T.S., McInnes, B.T., Kenneth, C., 2021. TopEx: Topic Exploration of COVID-19 Corpora - Results from the BioCreative VII Challenge Track 4, in: Proceedings of the BioCreative VII Challenge Evaluation Workshop. Presented at the BioCreative VII Workshop, Virtual, pp. 238–242.