Academic discourse on ChatGPT in social sciences: A topic modeling and sentiment analysis of research article abstracts

Abstract

The rapid emergence of ChatGPT has sparked extensive academic discourse across multiple fields. This study focuses on such discourse within the social sciences by examining how scholars frame and evaluate ChatGPT through research article abstracts. Drawing on 1,227 SSCI-indexed abstracts published between 30 November 2022 and 30 November 2024, we adopt a two-step natural language processing approach. First, we apply topic modeling to identify major thematic patterns in academic discussions of ChatGPT. Then, we perform sentiment analysis to examine how scholars' evaluative attitudes are discursively constructed across these thematic areas. Topic modeling reveals six key themes: artificial intelligence (AI) and technology communication, education and learning tools, user perception and adoption, ethics and academic challenges, human-technology interaction, and computational foundations of Large Language Models (LLMs). Sentiment analysis suggests that approximately 82.97% of abstracts express positive attitudes, particularly regarding ChatGPT's research potential and pedagogical utility, while around 9.78% reflect more cautious or negative views, often focusing on issues such as academic integrity and misinformation. These sentiment patterns appear to vary across thematic areas, with user adoption and education-related topics showing greater positivity, while ethics-oriented discussions exhibit relatively more critical perspectives. By analyzing academic discourse as reflected in research article abstracts, this study contributes a discourse-level perspective on how ChatGPT is framed, endorsed, and critically examined in the social sciences. It offers a data-driven complement to existing conceptual and survey-based investigations and draws attention to both the thematic and evaluative tendencies shaping scholarly narratives around generative AI.

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