How to manage hot topic analytics

Hot topics are calculated by an algorithm that takes into account the words that appear in a given set of records (for example, in support requests or in incidents), and finds the topics in those records by looking for correlations between subsets of the words. The calculation takes into account the textual fields of the records (for example, title, description, and solution). The list of topics is calculated by removing extraneous items such as email addresses, single letters, common and rare words, frequently appearing hyphenated terms, and stop list words.

The resulting calculated number of topics depends on the number of records. Only the largest topics are presented in the hot topics map.

Search for	Example	Results
A single word	`cat`	Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats".
A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase.	`"cat food"` (quotation marks)	Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase.

Search for	Operator	Example
Two or more words in the same topic	`AND` `and` `+` (plus symbol) `&` (ampersand)	`cat AND dog` `"cat food"+milk` `"cat food"&"dog food"`
Either word in a topic	`OR` `or` `\|` (pipe)	`cat OR dog` `cat \| dog`
Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase	`NOT` `not` `!` (exclamation point)	`NOT cat` `! dog`
Topics that contain one string and do not contain another	`^` (caret)	`cat ^ mouse`
A combination of search types	`( )` parentheses	`cat + (dog \| mouse)` `cat \| dog + (! mouse)`

Number of records	Number of topics calculated
Fewer than 50 records	3 topics
50-200 records	10 topics
200-500 records	20 topics
500-1000 records	30 topics
More than 1000 records	40 topics

Number of records

Number of topics calculated

Fewer than 50 records

3 topics

50-200 records

10 topics

200-500 records

20 topics

500-1000 records

30 topics

More than 1000 records

40 topics

The minimum number of records that is used for calculation is 20. The resulting topics are displayed in a hot topics map, showing the three or four most significant terms for each topic.

After the calculation, if a certain word is incorrectly or needlessly displayed in the hot topics map, it can be removed by adding it to the stop list.

Examples of when a stop list should be updated:

An office location (for example, London) appears in the topics map but has no significance. Using the Add to stop list option, you would add "London" to the user-defined stop list.
A known issue does not appear as a topic even though you believe it should, as it appears in many records. Using the Manage stop list option, you would search for this word and remove it from the relevant system-defined stop-list, if found.

Add a word to the user-defined stop list

When you add words to the stop list, they are added to a user-defined list that is independent of the language you are entering. This means that this user-defined list may contain words in multiple languages.

In the Hot Topic Analytics screen, click

Select one or more words to add to the stop list.

Note

Click to clear all selections.
Click to return to the hot topics map without adding any items to the stop list.

When you are finished, click to update the stop list and return to the Hot Topic Analytics screen. The hot topics map is updated to show that the terms are no longer included in the results, and the number of related records is updated as well.

Manage the stop list

Note To manage the stop list, you must have administrator permissions, or your role must include the Enable management of hot topic analytics permission.

When you manage the stop list, you can add or delete words from the user-defined list, as well as delete words from the out-of-the-box lists.

In the Hot Topic Analytics screen, click

To search for a particular word, enter it in the Search field and click

Do one of the following:

To add a word to the stop list, enter a word and click . The word is added to the user-defined list.
To remove a word from either the user-defined stop lists or one of the system-defined lists, select a specific list and click next to the words you want to remove.