Regularized Multimodal Hierarchical Topic Model for Document-by-Document Exploratory Search

In the exploratory search paradigm of information retrieval, the user has a complicated search demand that can not be formulated in a short query. The user collects thematically relevant information iteratively in a “query-browse-refine” process being motivated by learning, understanding, and knowledge acquisition purposes. We consider an elementary step of this scenario in which the search intent can be expressed by a long text query. For this case, we develop an exploratory search engine based on probabilistic topic modeling. Topic model gives a low-dimensional sparse interpretable vector representation (topical embedding) of a text. The search engine uses these embeddings for ranking documents by their similarity to the query. We show that performing only one query, the topic-based search engine achieves better precision and recall that human assessors do spending up to one hour in a conventional browse-refine loop. We use additive regularization for topic modeling (ARTM) to make the model simultaneously sparse, decorrelated, n-gram, multimodal and hierarchical. We show experimentally that each of these features of the model is important to achieve precision and recall higher than 90