UDC: 332.1(470.344):[004.9:336.563.1]
BBC: У9(2Рос.Чув)+А623:У261.54
Mitrofanova T.V., Khristoforova A.V.
Thematic modeling of grant projects as a tool for managing the social development of a region
Keywords: social systems, grant project analysis, the Chuvash Republic, thematic modeling, LDA, BERTopic, development management, natural language processing (NLP)
Managing the social development of a region in the context of digitalization requires effective analytical tools and accurate rating systems. One of these tools can be thematic modeling, which enables to carry out automatic generalization and structuring of large text arrays. The article is devoted to applying thematic modeling methods for the analysis of grant projects in the Chuvash Republic. The relevance of the research is due to the need to analyze the topics of grant projects in order to identify key areas of socially significant activities and their compliance with regional strategic goals. The purpose of the study is to identify the key thematic areas of supported grant projects using thematic modeling methods (LDA and BERTopic) to improve the effectiveness of managing the social development of the region. Materials and methods. For the analysis, a dataset containing descriptions of the winning projects of grant competitions in the Chuvash Republic for 2023–2025 was used. The texts were pre-processed, including purification from stop words, normalization and lemmatization using the Stanza library. The LDA and BERTopic methods were applied to identify thematic clusters, and visualization of the results was performed using the pyLDAvis library. Results. As a result of the analysis, five main thematic areas were identified: support and social assistance to vulnerable groups of the population, sports and mass events, development and health of children, including those with disabilities, education and youth development, psychological and social support for program participants. The key directions of the region's development were identified, which makes it possible to increase the effectiveness of strategic planning for grant support for future applications. The study confirmed that the topics have a high degree of compliance with the goals of the Development Strategy of the Chuvash Republic until 2035 and federal national projects. The results of the conducted research can be used by grant-givers to change and adapt the competitive conditions and evaluation criteria, as well as to introduce new relevant research areas. In addition, organizations can apply the results of the study to prepare more relevant applications that meet current social needs of the region. Conclusions. Five key areas of grant support in the Chuvash Republic were identified, which provides the governing bodies with an objective and structured basis for adjusting regional policy and evaluating the effectiveness of resource allocation mechanisms. The study confirmed high efficiency of using thematic modeling methods to analyze the corpus of text descriptions of grant projects. The thematic areas of grant support in the Chuvash Republic in 2023–2025 identified by the authors using LDA and BERTopic methods correspond to the goals stated in the strategic regional documents. The results of the work can serve as a basis for improving competitive grant support mechanisms in the field of managing the social development of the region.
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About authors
- Mitrofanova Tatiana V.
- Candidate of Physics and Mathematics Sciences, Assoсiate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Hardware Support for Information Systems, Chuvash State University, Russia, Cheboksary (mitrofanova_tv@mail.ru; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5750-7991)
- Khristoforova Anastasiia V.
- Candidate of Physics and Mathematics Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Hardware Support for Information Systems, Chuvash State University, Russia, Cheboksary (khristofav@mail.ru; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3534-8747)
Article link
Mitrofanova T.V., Khristoforova A.V. Thematic modeling of grant projects as a tool for managing the social development of a region [Electronic resource] // Oeconomia et Jus. – 2025. – №4. P. 25-37. – URL: https://oecomia-et-jus.ru/en/single/2025/4/3/. DOI: 10.47026/2499-9636-2025-4-25-37.