Topic tasseographeR: An interactive R‑Shiny application to interpret and validate topic models

Interpreting and validating topic-model outputs remains a persistent challenge in text-as-data research. We introduce Topic tasseographeR, an R Shiny application that supports topic interpretation and validation through post-hoc dictionary-based scoring. The app computes topic content and topic function scores by combining established lexical resources with topic–word and document–topic distributions. Designed to be model-agnostic, Topic tasseographeR integrates seamlessly with existing topic-modelling workflows and enables both deductive validation and abductive topic labelling. By leveraging validate dictionary-based methods, the software provides a complementary alternative to human- and machine-in-the-loop topic interpretation and validation approaches.