My Approach = Your Apparatus? Entropy-Based Topic Modeling on Multiple Domain-Specific Text Collections
This work addresses the problem of analyzing and comparing large document sets across domains like patents and scientific papers for researchers and analysts, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackled the challenge of cross-collection topic modeling due to domain-specific vocabulary by presenting a model that uses information entropy to distinguish collection-specific and independent words, achieving up to 13% higher topic coherence, 4% lower perplexity, and 31% higher document classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Comparative text mining extends from genre analysis and political bias detection to the revelation of cultural and geographic differences, through to the search for prior art across patents and scientific papers. These applications use cross-collection topic modeling for the exploration, clustering, and comparison of large sets of documents, such as digital libraries. However, topic modeling on documents from different collections is challenging because of domain-specific vocabulary. We present a cross-collection topic model combined with automatic domain term extraction and phrase segmentation. This model distinguishes collection-specific and collection-independent words based on information entropy and reveals commonalities and differences of multiple text collections. We evaluate our model on patents, scientific papers, newspaper articles, forum posts, and Wikipedia articles. In comparison to state-of-the-art cross-collection topic modeling, our model achieves up to 13% higher topic coherence, up to 4% lower perplexity, and up to 31% higher document classification accuracy. More importantly, our approach is the first topic model that ensures disjunct general and specific word distributions, resulting in clear-cut topic representations.