Bridging Semantics and Behavior: An Agent-Based Evolutionary Model of Topic Competition with BERTopic

Abstract

Understanding how information spreads and opinions evolve on social media is a core challenge in computational social science. Users constantly face competing topics, yet their decisions to engage are shaped by social learning, perceived utility, and cognitive limits. Traditional models often separate content from behavior, missing how individual cognition and social interaction jointly drive large-scale discourse. We propose a language-independent computational framework that bridges semantic topic modeling with evolutionary game theory and agent-based simulation. Using BERTopic, we extract coherent topics from a large Weibo dataset. We then quantify engagement through a unified metric based on likes, comments, and reposts. In NetLogo, agents update topic preferences via local imitation, guided by payoff comparisons and behavioral noise---mirroring real-world bounded rationality. Tests on two real-world datasets show that our model successfully replicates observed topic diffusion trends. It highlights how social learning frequency and payoff sensitivity shape public attention. Our results demonstrate that micro-level mechanisms---imitation and noise-tolerant choice---can produce emergent macro-level patterns. This work contributes to human-computer interaction by linking semantic analysis with behavioral simulation, offering insights into the cognitive and social foundations of online collective behavior. The framework also has practical potential for misinformation resilience, opinion forecasting, and adaptive content curation.