Revisiting Automated Topic Model Evaluation with Large Language Models

Dominik Stammbach, Vilém Zouhar, Alexander Hoyle, Mrinmaya Sachan, Elliott Ash


Abstract
Topic models help us make sense of large text collections. Automatically evaluating their output and determining the optimal number of topics are both longstanding challenges, with no effective automated solutions to date. This paper proposes using large language models (LLMs) for these tasks. We find that LLMs appropriately assess the resulting topics, correlating more strongly with human judgments than existing automated metrics. However, the setup of the evaluation task is crucial — LLMs perform better on coherence ratings of word sets than on intrustion detection. We find that LLMs can also assist us in guiding us towards a reasonable number of topics. In actual applications, topic models are typically used to answer a research question related to a collection of texts. We can incorporate this research question in the prompt to the LLM, which helps estimating the optimal number of topics.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.581
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9348–9357
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.581
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.581
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dominik Stammbach, Vilém Zouhar, Alexander Hoyle, Mrinmaya Sachan, and Elliott Ash. 2023. Revisiting Automated Topic Model Evaluation with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9348–9357, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Revisiting Automated Topic Model Evaluation with Large Language Models (Stammbach et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.581.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.581.mp4