HTMOT: Hierarchical Topic Modelling over Time

Judicael Poumay, Ashwin Ittoo


Abstract
Topic models provide an efficient way of extracting insights from text and supporting decision-making. Recently, novel methods have been proposed to model topic hierarchy or temporality. Modeling temporality provides more precise topics by separating topics that are characterized by similar words but located over distinct time periods. Conversely, modeling hierarchy provides a more detailed view of the content of a corpus by providing topics and sub-topics. However, no models have been proposed to incorporate both hierarchy and temporality which could be beneficial for applications such as environment scanning. Therefore, we propose a novel method to perform Hierarchical Topic Modelling Over Time (HTMOT). We evaluate the performance of our approach on a corpus of news articles using the Word Intrusion task. Results demonstrate that our model produces topics that elegantly combine a hierarchical structure and a temporal aspect. Furthermore, our proposed Gibbs sampling implementation shows competitive performance compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2023.ranlp-1.92
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
854–863
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.92
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Judicael Poumay and Ashwin Ittoo. 2023. HTMOT: Hierarchical Topic Modelling over Time. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 854–863, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
HTMOT: Hierarchical Topic Modelling over Time (Poumay & Ittoo, RANLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.92.pdf