A Novel Generative Topic Embedding Model by Introducing Network Communities

Di Jin, Jiantao Huang, Pengfei Jiao, Liang Yang, Dongxiao He, Françoise Soulie-Fogelman, Yuxiao Huang

Abstract: Topic models have many important applications in fields such as Natural Language Processing. Topic embedding modelling aims at introducing word and topic embeddings into topic models to describe correlations between topics. Existing topic embedding methods use documents alone, which suffer from the topical fuzziness problem brought by the introduction of embeddings of semantic fuzzy words, e.g. polysemous words or some misleading academic terms. Links often exist between documents which form document networks. The use of links may alleviate this semantic fuzziness, but they are sparse and noisy which may meanwhile mislead topics. In this paper, we utilize community structure to solve these problems. It can not only alleviate the topical fuzziness of topic embeddings since communities are often believed to be topic related, but also can overcome the drawbacks brought by the sparsity and noise of networks (because community is a high-order network information). We give a new generative topic embedding model which incorporates documents (with topics) and network (with communities) together, and uses probability transition to describe the relationship between topics and communities to make it robust when topics and communities do not match. An efficient variational inference algorithm is then proposed to learn the model. We validate the superiority of our new approach on two tasks, document classifications and visualization of topic embeddings, respectively.