Privacy Law Commons^™

One Hundred Twenty Years Of U.S. Privacy Law Scholarship: A Latent Semantic Analysis, Robert Sprague, Kevin Grauberger, Nicole Barberis

Robert Sprague

This paper reports results from a research project aimed at identifying fundamental privacy law principles derived from the writings of legal scholars and commentators using probabilistic topic modeling, which is comprised of a suite of algorithms that attempt to discover hidden thematic structures in large archives of documents. Topic modeling algorithms are statistical methods that analyze the words of texts to discover topics (themes) contained within, how those topics are connected to each other, and how they change over time. A latent Dirichlet allocation process, which identifies sets of terms that more tightly co-occur, is incorporated into the topic modeling …