text: Inferring topics from the overwhelming amount of short texts becomes a critical but challenging task for many content analysis tasks, such as content charactering, user interest profiling, and emerging topic detecting. Existing methods such as probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) cannot solve this prob- lem very well since only very limited word co-occurrence information is available in short texts. This paper studies how to incorporate the external word correlation knowledge into short texts to improve the coherence of topic modeling. Based on recent results in word embeddings that learn se- mantically representations for words from a large corpus, we introduce a novel method, Embedding-based Topic Model (ETM), to learn latent topics from short texts. ETM not only solves the problem of very limited word co-occurrence information by aggregating short texts into long pseudo- texts, but also utilizes a Markov Random Field regularized model that gives correlated words a better chance to be put into the same topic. The experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our model comparing with the state-of-the-art models.
  @cite_30: Short text clustering has become an increasingly important task with the popularity of social media like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. It is a challenging problem due to its sparse, high-dimensional, and large-volume characteristics. In this paper, we proposed a collapsed Gibbs Sampling algorithm for the Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture model for short text clustering (abbr. to GSDMM). We found that GSDMM can infer the number of clusters automatically with a good balance between the completeness and homogeneity of the clustering results, and is fast to converge. GSDMM can also cope with the sparse and high-dimensional problem of short texts, and can obtain the representative words of each cluster. Our extensive experimental study shows that GSDMM can achieve significantly better performance than three other clustering models.
  @cite_33: Topic models have the potential to improve search and browsing by extracting useful semantic themes from web pages and other text documents. When learned topics are coherent and interpretable, they can be valuable for faceted browsing, results set diversity analysis, and document retrieval. However, when dealing with small collections or noisy text (e.g. web search result snippets or blog posts), learned topics can be less coherent, less interpretable, and less useful. To overcome this, we propose two methods to regularize the learning of topic models. Our regularizers work by creating a structured prior over words that reflect broad patterns in the external data. Using thirteen datasets we show that both regularizers improve topic coherence and interpretability while learning a faithful representation of the collection of interest. Overall, this work makes topic models more useful across a broader range of text data.
  @cite_9: The overwhelming amount of short text data on social media and elsewhere has posed great challenges to topic modeling due to the sparsity problem. Most existing attempts to alleviate this problem resort to heuristic strategies to aggregate short texts into pseudo-documents before the application of standard topic modeling. Although such strategies cannot be well generalized to more general genres of short texts, the success has shed light on how to develop a generalized solution. In this paper, we present a novel model towards this goal by integrating topic modeling with short text aggregation during topic inference. The aggregation is founded on general topical affinity of texts rather than particular heuristics, making the model readily applicable to various short texts. Experimental results on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of this new model, suggesting that it can distill more meaningful topics from short texts.
  @cite_24: Twitter as a new form of social media can potentially contain much useful information, but content analysis on Twitter has not been well studied. In particular, it is not clear whether as an information source Twitter can be simply regarded as a faster news feed that covers mostly the same information as traditional news media. In This paper we empirically compare the content of Twitter with a traditional news medium, New York Times, using unsupervised topic modeling. We use a Twitter-LDA model to discover topics from a representative sample of the entire Twitter. We then use text mining techniques to compare these Twitter topics with topics from New York Times, taking into consideration topic categories and types. We also study the relation between the proportions of opinionated tweets and retweets and topic categories and types. Our comparisons show interesting and useful findings for downstream IR or DM applications.
  @cite_2: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a popular topic modeling technique for exploring hidden topics in text corpora. Standard LDA model suffers the problem that the topic assignment of each word is independent and lacks the mechanism to utilize the rich prior background knowledge to learn semantically coherent topics. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a model called Entity Correlation Latent Dirichlet Allocation (EC-LDA) by incorporating constraints derived from entity correlations as the prior knowledge into LDA topic model. Different from other knowledge-based topic models which extract the knowledge information directly from the train dataset itself or even from the human judgements, for our work, we take advantage of the prior knowledge from the external knowledge base (Freebase 1, in our experiment). Hence, our approach is more suitable to widely kinds of text corpora in different scenarios. We fit our proposed model using Gibbs sampling. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model compared with standard LDA.
summary: Recently, some works found that even through the assumption that each text is generated by one topic does not fit long texts, it can work well for short texts @cite_9 @cite_30 . Therefore, many topic models adopted this assumption to discover the latent topics in short texts. @cite_24 empirically compared the data with traditional news media, and proposed a Twitter-LDA model by assuming that one tweet is generated from one topic. Yin and Wang @cite_30 also adopted this assumption for topic inference based on Gibbs sampling. However, these models failed to solve the problem of very limited word co-occurrence information in short texts. Therefore, motivated by the results that prior domain knowledge is useful for long text topic models @cite_33 @cite_2 , we will propose a novel method for short texts by incorporating the external word correlation knowledge provided by word embeddings to improve the quality of topic modeling.