Knowledge Source Rankings for Semi-Supervised Topic Modeling

Abstract

Recent work suggests knowledge sources can be added into the topic modeling process to label topics and improve topic discovery. The knowledge sources typically consist of a collection of human-constructed articles, each describing a topic (article-topic) for an entire domain. However, these semisupervised topic models assume a corpus to contain topics on only a subset of a domain. Therefore, during inference, the model must consider which article-topics were theoretically used to generate the corpus. Since the knowledge sources tend to be quite large, the many article-topics considered slow down the inference process. The increase in execution time is significant, with knowledge source input greater than 103 becoming unfeasible for use in topic modeling. To increase the applicability of semisupervised topic models, approaches are needed to speed up the overall execution time. This paper presents a way of ranking knowledge source topics to satisfy the above goal. Our approach utilizes a knowledge source ranking, based on the PageRank algorithm, to determine the importance of an article-topic. By applying our ranking technique we can eliminate low scoring article-topics before inference, speeding up the overall process. Remarkably, this ranking technique can also improve perplexity and interpretability. Results show our approach to outperform baseline methods and significantly aid semisupervised topic models. In our evaluation, knowledge source rankings yield a 44% increase in topic retrieval f-score, a 42.6% increase in inter-inference topic elimination, a 64% increase in perplexity, a 30% increase in token assignment accuracy, a 20% increase in topic composition interpretability, and a 5% increase in document assignment interpretability over baseline methods.