The Number of Topics Optimization: Clustering Approach

Abstract

Although topic models have been used to build clusters of documents for more than ten years, there is still a problem of choosing the optimal number of topics. The authors analyzed many fundamental studies undertaken on the subject in recent years. The main problem is the lack of a stable metric of the quality of topics obtained during the construction of the topic model. The authors analyzed the internal metrics of the topic model: coherence, contrast, and purity to determine the optimal number of topics and concluded that they are not applicable to solve this problem. The authors analyzed the approach to choosing the optimal number of topics based on the quality of the clusters. For this purpose, the authors considered the behavior of the cluster validation metrics: the Davies Bouldin index, the silhouette coefficient, and the Calinski-Harabaz index. A new method for determining the optimal number of topics proposed in this paper is based on the following principles: (1) Setting up a topic model with additive regularization (ARTM) to separate noise topics; (2) Using dense vector representation (GloVe, FastText, Word2Vec); (3) Using a cosine measure for the distance in cluster metric that works better than Euclidean distance on vectors with large dimensions. The methodology developed by the authors for obtaining the optimal number of topics was tested on the collection of scientific articles from the OnePetro library, selected by specific themes. The experiment showed that the method proposed by the authors allows assessing the optimal number of topics for the topic model built on a small collection of English documents.