Multiscale topic tomography

Modeling the evolution of topics with time is of great value in automatic summarization and analysis of large document collections. In this work, we propose a new probabilistic graphical model to address this issue. The new model, which we call the Multiscale Topic Tomography Model (MTTM), employs non-homogeneous Poisson processes to model generation of word-counts. The evolution of topics is modeled through a multi-scale analysis using Haar wavelets. One of the new features of the model is its modeling the evolution of topics at various time-scales of resolution, allowing the user to zoom in and out of the time-scales. Our experiments on Science data using the new model uncovers some interesting patterns in topics. The new model is also comparable to LDA in predicting unseen data as demonstrated by our perplexity experiments. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.6 [Artificial Intelligence]: Learning; H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications--data mining General Terms Algo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Ramesh Nallapati, Susan Ditmore, John D. Lafferty, Kin Ung
• Keywords: Data Mining, KDD 2007, Keywords Topic Modeling, Probabilistic Graphical Model, Topic Tomography Model