Topic Modeling Analysis of Indonesia Food-Security News: Methods,Interpretations, and Trend Insights
Authors
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Afiyati
Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, Indonesia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7187-3373
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Imbuh Rochmad
Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, Indonesia
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Setiyo Budiyanto
Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, Indonesia
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Bambang Jokonowo
Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, Indonesia
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Hadi Santoso
Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, Indonesia
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Kelik Budiana
National Food Agency of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30812/matrik.v25i2.5784Keywords:
Food security, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Policy, PyLDAvis, Topic ModellingAbstract
The critical problem for food-security stakeholders in Indonesia is the lack of scalable, quantitative methods to systematically distill dominant themes and evolving trends from vast volumes of news media, which severely hinders timely policy monitoring and responsive intervention. This study aimed to develop and validate a reproducible topic modeling pipeline specifically designed to uncover the latent thematic structure and quantify the temporal dynamics within Indonesian food-security news discourse. The research method is a comprehensive natural language processing pipeline applied to a curated corpus of 770 news documents spanning 2012 to 2025. The process involved languageadaptive preprocessing of Indonesian text, n-gram (1-2) vectorization to capture nuanced phrases, and training multiple Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models. The optimal model, with K=10 topics,
was rigorously selected through a perplexity-based grid search across a range of potential topic numbers. The resulting topics were then qualitatively interpreted and manually labeled into policy-relevant themes by domain experts. Subsequently, we computed monthly topic intensity series to conduct a longitudinal analysis. The results of this research are that the pipeline successfully generated semantically coherent topics that aligned perfectly with core policy pillars, including availability, access, and utilization. Furthermore, the analysis revealed significant temporal shifts, sustained intensification of price and inflation-related discussions throughout the 2022-2024 period. This study conclusively demonstrates that unsupervised topic modeling can effectively transform unstructured news streams into actionable, quantifiable intelligence, thereby significantly enhancing situational awareness and supporting evidence-based decision-making for food security stakeholders.
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