Discovering Semantic Structures in Psychological Scales: A Response-Free Front-End to Efficient Simplification

Abstract

Psychological scale refinement traditionally relies on response-based methods such as factor analysis, item response theory, and network psychometrics to uncover latent constructs and optimize item composition. Although rigorous, these approaches require large samples and may be constrained by data availability and cross-cultural comparability. Recent advances in natural language processing suggest that the wording of scale items contains construct-relevant semantic organization, offering a complementary response-free perspective. We introduce a topic-modeling framework that operationalizes item-level semantic structure for systematic scale simplification. Items are encoded using contextual sentence embeddings and grouped through density-based clustering to identify semantic topics without predefining their number. Within each cluster, class-based term weighting identifies representative keywords that summarize each topic and support an interpretable semantic pre-structure of the item pool. Semantically related clusters are hierarchically merged, and representative items are selected using structure-aware membership criteria within an integrated reduction pipeline. We evaluated the framework on three widely used instruments: DASS, IPIP, and EPOCH, covering negative affect, personality traits, and well-being. Results showed that the identified semantic topics often formed factor-like groupings aligned with established constructs. Representative items selected through semantic membership probabilities reduced item counts by 60.5% on average while maintaining acceptable psychometric properties and preserving factor correlation patterns. Our framework formalizes semantic topic structure as an inspectable front-end for scale construction and simplification. To facilitate adoption, we provide a visualization-supported tool enabling one-click semantic analysis and structured simplification.