Large-Scale Correlation Analysis of Automated Metrics for Topic Models

Jia Peng Lim, Hady Lauw


Abstract
Automated coherence metrics constitute an important and popular way to evaluate topic models. Previous works present a mixed picture of their presumed correlation with human judgement. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale correlation analysis of coherence metrics. We propose a novel sampling approach to mine topics for the purpose of metric evaluation, and conduct the analysis via three large corpora showing that certain automated coherence metrics are correlated. Moreover, we extend the analysis to measure topical differences between corpora. Lastly, we examine the reliability of human judgement by conducting an extensive user study, which is designed as an amalgamation of different proxy tasks to derive a finer insight into the human decision-making processes. Our findings reveal some correlation between automated coherence metrics and human judgement, especially for generic corpora.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.776
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13874–13898
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.776
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.776
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jia Peng Lim and Hady Lauw. 2023. Large-Scale Correlation Analysis of Automated Metrics for Topic Models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13874–13898, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large-Scale Correlation Analysis of Automated Metrics for Topic Models (Lim & Lauw, ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.776.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.776.mp4