Extending Jensen Shannon Divergence to Compare Multiple Corpora

Investigating public discourse on social media platforms has proven a viable way to reflect the impacts of political issues. In this paper we frame this as a corpus comparison problem in which the online discussion of different groups are treated as different corpora to be compared. We propose an extended version of the Jensen-Shannon divergence measure to compare multiple corpora and use the FP-growth algorithm to mix unigrams and bigrams in this comparison. We also propose a set of visualizations that can illustrate the results of this analysis. To demonstrate these approaches we compare the Twitter discourse surrounding Brexit in Ireland and Great Britain across a 14 week time period.