Константин Вячеславович Воронцов

Topic modelling is an area of text mining that has been actively developed in the last 15 years. A probabilistic topic model extracts a set of hidden topics from a collection of text documents. It defines each topic by a probability distribution over words and describes each document with a probability distribution over topics. In applications, there are often many requirements, such as, for example, problem-specific knowledge and additional data, to be taken into account. Therefore, it is natural for topic modelling to be considered a multiobjective optimization problem. However, historically, Bayesian learning became the most popular approach for topic modelling. In the Bayesian paradigm, all requirements are formalized in terms of a probabilistic generative process. This approach is not always convenient due to some limitations and technical difficulties. In this work, we develop a non-Bayesian multiobjective approach called the Additive Regularization of Topic Models (ARTM). It is based on regularized Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), and we show that many of the well-known Bayesian topic models can be re-formulated in a much simpler way using the regularization point of view. We review some of the most important types of topic models: multimodal, multilingual, temporal, hierarchical, graph-based, and short-text. The ARTM framework enables easy combination of different types of models to create new models with the desired properties for applications. This modular “lego-style” technology for topic modelling is implemented in the open-source library BigARTM.

Social studies of the Internet have adopted large-scale text mining for unsupervised discovery of topics related to specific subjects. A recently developed approach to topic modeling, additive regularization of topic models (ARTM), provides fast inference and more control over the topics with a wide variety of possible regularizers than developing LDA extensions. We apply ARTM to mining ethnic-related content from Russian-language blogosphere, introduce a new combined regularizer, and compare models derived from ARTM with LDA. We show with human evaluations that ARTM is better for mining topics on specific subjects, finding more relevant topics of higher or comparable quality.

Probabilistic topic modeling of text collections is a powerful tool for statistical text analysis based on the preferential use of graphical models and Bayesian learning. Additive regularization for topic modeling (ARTM) is a recent semiprobabilistic approach, which provides a simpler inference for many models previously studied only in the Bayesian settings. ARTM reduces barriers to entry into topic modeling research field and facilitates combination of topic models. In this paper we develop the multimodal extension of ARTM approach and implement it in BigARTM open source project for online parallelized topic modeling. We demonstrate the ability of non-Bayesian regularization to combine modalities, languages and multiple criteria to find sparse, diverse, and interpretable topics.