Zhenhong Chen


2016

pdf bib
Exploring Topic Discriminating Power of Words in Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Kai Yang | Yi Cai | Zhenhong Chen | Ho-fung Leung | Raymond Lau
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and its variants have been widely used to discover latent topics in textual documents. However, some of topics generated by LDA may be noisy with irrelevant words scattering across these topics. We name this kind of words as topic-indiscriminate words, which tend to make topics more ambiguous and less interpretable by humans. In our work, we propose a new topic model named TWLDA, which assigns low weights to words with low topic discriminating power (ability). Our experimental results show that the proposed approach, which effectively reduces the number of topic-indiscriminate words in discovered topics, improves the effectiveness of LDA.