UW Interactive Data Lab
IDL logo

Topic Model Diagnostics: Assessing Domain Relevance via Topical Alignment

Jason Chuang, Sonal Gupta, Christopher D. Manning, Jeffrey Heer. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2013
Figure for Topic Model Diagnostics: Assessing Domain Relevance via Topical Alignment
We present a framework to support large-scale assessment of topic models. On the top left, the correspondence chart visualizes the alignment between human-identified concepts and machine-generated latent topics. We then introduce a process to automate the calculation of topical alignment, so that analysts can compare any number of models to known domain concepts and examine the deviations.
Materials
PDF | Supplement
Abstract
The use of topic models to analyze domain-specific texts often requires manual validation of the latent topics to ensure that they are meaningful. We introduce a framework to support such a large-scale assessment of topical relevance. We measure the correspondence between a set of latent topics and a set of reference concepts to quantify four types of topical misalignment: junk, fused, missing, and repeated topics. Our analysis compares 10,000 topic model variants to 200 expert-provided domain concepts, and demonstrates how our framework can inform choices of model parameters, inference algorithms, and intrinsic measures of topical quality.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{2013-topic-model-diagnostics,
  title = {Topic Model Diagnostics: Assessing Domain Relevance via Topical Alignment},
  author = {Chuang, Jason AND Gupta, Sonal AND Manning, Christopher AND Heer, Jeffrey},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2013},
  url = {https://uwdata.github.io/papers/topic-model-diagnostics}
}