Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation

Yang Lin, Xinyu Ma, Xin Gao, Ruiqing Li, Yasha Wang, Xu Chu


Abstract
Extracting semantic topics from short texts presents a significant challenge in the field of data mining. While efforts have been made to mitigate data sparsity issue, the limited length of short documents also results in the absence of semantically relevant words, causing biased evidence lower bound and incomplete labels for likelihood maximization. We refer to this issue as the label sparsity problem. To combat this problem, we propose kNNTM, a neural short text topic model that incorporates a k-Nearest-Neighbor-based label completion algorithm by augmenting the reconstruction label with k-nearest documents to complement these relevant but unobserved words. Furthermore, seeking a precise reflection of distances between documents, we propose a fused multi-view distances metric that takes both local word similarities and global topic semantics into consideration. Extensive experiments on multiple public short-text datasets show that kNNTM model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models and can derive both high-quality topics and document representations.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.817
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13762–13774
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.817
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Lin, Xinyu Ma, Xin Gao, Ruiqing Li, Yasha Wang, and Xu Chu. 2024. Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 13762–13774, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation (Lin et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.817.pdf