Improving topic model stability for effective document exploration

Abstract

Topic modeling has become a ubiquitous topic analysis tool for text exploration. Most of the existing works on topic modeling focus on fitting topic models to input data. They however ignore an important usability issue that is closely related to the end user experience: stability. In this study, we investigate the stability problem in topic modeling. We first report on the experiments conducted to quantify the severity of the problem. We then propose a new learning framework to mitigate the problem by explicitly incorporating topic stability constraints in model training. We also perform user study to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.