Combining Thesaurus Knowledge and Probabilistic Topic Models
This work addresses the challenge of improving topic modeling accuracy for text analysis applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing topic models with thesaurus integration.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing probabilistic topic models by integrating thesaurus knowledge, showing that using domain-specific thesauri improves topic models, while general thesauri like WordNet require excluding hyponymy relations for effective improvement.
In this paper we present the approach of introducing thesaurus knowledge into probabilistic topic models. The main idea of the approach is based on the assumption that the frequencies of semantically related words and phrases, which are met in the same texts, should be enhanced: this action leads to their larger contribution into topics found in these texts. We have conducted experiments with several thesauri and found that for improving topic models, it is useful to utilize domain-specific knowledge. If a general thesaurus, such as WordNet, is used, the thesaurus-based improvement of topic models can be achieved with excluding hyponymy relations in combined topic models.