Context reinforced neural topic modeling over short texts

Abstract

As one of the prevalent topic mining methods, neural topic modeling has attracted a lot of interests due to the advantages of low training costs and strong generalisation abilities. However, the existing neural topic models may suffer from the feature sparsity problem when applied to short texts, due to the lack of context in each message. To alleviate this issue, we propose a Context Reinforced Neural Topic Model (CRNTM), whose characteristics can be summarized as follows. First, by assuming that each short text covers only a few salient topics, the proposed CRNTM infers the topic for each word in a narrow range. Second, our model exploits pre-trained word embeddings by treating topics as multivariate Gaussian distributions or Gaussian mixture distributions in the embedding space. Extensive experiments on two benchmark short corpora validate the effectiveness of the proposed model on both topic discovery and text classification.