The relevance is due to the fact that participants in the global society of the 21st century should have the opportunity to develop skills of fluency in technological tools, create intercultural connections with others, disseminate information for global communities, and evaluate multimedia texts.

     The reasons for the problem of this study is the difficulty of obtaining up-to-date information, due to the growing volume of data, which for the most part are not structured. In the form of justification of the need to search for its solutions, the article examines the materials published in the period from 1975 to 2021 in English in the Web of Science database from Clarivate Analytics.

     The purpose of the research is to identify the main thematic areas of scientific discourse in the field of the development of functional literacy in higher education and their use as an informative base for further research on the topic.

     The research methodology uses one of the methods in the field of intellectual text analysis – thematic modeling, the essence of which is the process of automatic identification of topics and obtaining hidden patterns displayed by the text corpus. 

     Thematic modeling made it possible to give the results of the article greater scientific objectivity to an exploratory literary review. Data visualization shows that the topic of attributes and competencies of graduates is relevant in various fields, from psychological research, business management, computer engineering to clinical and medical sciences.

     The scientific novelty of the study is a departure from the traditional methodological approach to conducting a thematic review of scientific literature in favor of using machine learning methods.

     The practical significance is determined by the fact that in the context of a new approach to literary review, the study will determine the main thematic areas of scientific discourse in the field of functional literacy development in higher education.

     Based on the results, it can be concluded that this article was aimed at using mathematical modeling as a new smart approach to reviewing the literature on the topic of key competencies of university graduates. The frame used is based on the LDA thematic model, which combines related articles into thematic groups.

            The recommendations are the researchers' conclusions that the training of specialists should begin with the transformation of pedagogical approaches with the mandatory formation of links between the labor market, employers and universities.