@inproceedings{singaravadivelan-etal-2026-cobwebtm,
title = "{C}obweb{TM}: Probabilistic Concept Formation for Lifelong and Hierarchical Topic Modeling",
author = "Singaravadivelan, Karthik and
Gupta, Anant and
Wang, Zekun and
MacLellan, Christopher J.",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1753/",
pages = "35140--35155",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent semantic structure in text corpora with minimal supervision. Neural approaches achieve strong performance but require extensive tuning and struggle with lifelong learning due to catastrophic forgetting and fixed capacity, while classical probabilistic models lack flexibility and adaptability to streaming data. We introduce CobwebTM, a low-parameter lifelong hierarchical topic model based on incremental probabilistic concept formation. By adapting the Cobweb algorithm to continuous document embeddings, CobwebTM constructs semantic hierarchies online, enabling unsupervised topic discovery, dynamic topic creation, and hierarchical organization without predefining the number of topics. Across diverse datasets, CobwebTM achieves strong topic coherence, stable topics over time, and high-quality hierarchies, demonstrating that incremental symbolic concept formation combined with pretrained representations is an efficient approach to topic modeling."
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<abstract>Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent semantic structure in text corpora with minimal supervision. Neural approaches achieve strong performance but require extensive tuning and struggle with lifelong learning due to catastrophic forgetting and fixed capacity, while classical probabilistic models lack flexibility and adaptability to streaming data. We introduce CobwebTM, a low-parameter lifelong hierarchical topic model based on incremental probabilistic concept formation. By adapting the Cobweb algorithm to continuous document embeddings, CobwebTM constructs semantic hierarchies online, enabling unsupervised topic discovery, dynamic topic creation, and hierarchical organization without predefining the number of topics. Across diverse datasets, CobwebTM achieves strong topic coherence, stable topics over time, and high-quality hierarchies, demonstrating that incremental symbolic concept formation combined with pretrained representations is an efficient approach to topic modeling.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T CobwebTM: Probabilistic Concept Formation for Lifelong and Hierarchical Topic Modeling
%A Singaravadivelan, Karthik
%A Gupta, Anant
%A Wang, Zekun
%A MacLellan, Christopher J.
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F singaravadivelan-etal-2026-cobwebtm
%X Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent semantic structure in text corpora with minimal supervision. Neural approaches achieve strong performance but require extensive tuning and struggle with lifelong learning due to catastrophic forgetting and fixed capacity, while classical probabilistic models lack flexibility and adaptability to streaming data. We introduce CobwebTM, a low-parameter lifelong hierarchical topic model based on incremental probabilistic concept formation. By adapting the Cobweb algorithm to continuous document embeddings, CobwebTM constructs semantic hierarchies online, enabling unsupervised topic discovery, dynamic topic creation, and hierarchical organization without predefining the number of topics. Across diverse datasets, CobwebTM achieves strong topic coherence, stable topics over time, and high-quality hierarchies, demonstrating that incremental symbolic concept formation combined with pretrained representations is an efficient approach to topic modeling.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1753/
%P 35140-35155
Markdown (Informal)
[CobwebTM: Probabilistic Concept Formation for Lifelong and Hierarchical Topic Modeling](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1753/) (Singaravadivelan et al., Findings 2026)
ACL