Human in the Loop: How to Effectively Create Coherent Topics by Manually Labeling Only a Few Documents per Class

Anton Frederik Thielmann, Christoph Weisser, Benjamin Säfken

Abstract: Few-shot methods for accurate modeling under sparse label-settings have improved significantly. However, the applications of few-shot modeling in natural language processing remain solely in the field of document classification. With recent performance improvements, supervised few-shot methods, combined with a simple topic extraction method pose a significant challenge to unsupervised topic modeling methods. Our research shows that supervised few-shot learning, combined with a simple topic extraction method, can outperform unsupervised topic modeling techniques in terms of generating coherent topics, even when only a few labeled documents per class are used. The code is available at the following link: https://github.com/AnFreTh/STREAM