Incremental Topic Modeling for Scientific Trend Topics Extraction

Rapid growth of scientific publications and intensive emergence of new directions and approaches poses a challenge to the scientific community to identify trends in a timely and automatic manner. We denote trend as a semantically homogeneous theme that is characterized by a lexical kernel steadily evolving in time and a sharp, often exponential, increase in the number of publications. In this paper, we investigate recent topic modeling approaches to accurately extract trending topics at an early stage. In particular, we customize the standard ARTM-based approach and propose a novel incremental training technique which helps the model to operate on data in real-time. We further create the Artificial Intelligence Trends Dataset (AITD) that contains a collection of early-stage articles and a set of key collocations for each trend. The conducted experiments demonstrate that the suggested ARTM-based approach outperforms the classic PLSA, LDA models and a neural approach based on BERT representations. Our models and dataset are open for research purposes.