Graph neural topic model with commonsense knowledge

Abstract

Traditional topic models are based on the bag-of-words assumption, which states that the topic assignment of each word is independent of the others. However, this assumption ignores the relationship between words, which may hinder the quality of extracted topics. To address this issue, some recent works formulate documents as graphs based on word co-occurrence patterns. It assumes that if two words co-occur frequently, they should have the same topic. Nevertheless, it introduces noise edges into the model and thus hinders topic quality since two words co-occur frequently do not mean that they are on the same topic. In this paper, we use the commonsense relationship between words as a bridge to connect the words in each document. Compared to word co-occurrence, the commonsense relationship can explicitly imply the semantic relevance between words, which can be utilized to filter out noise edges. We use a relational graph neural network to capture the relation information in the graph. Moreover, manifold regularization is utilized to constrain the documents’ topic distributions. Experimental results on a public dataset show that our method is effective at extracting topics compared to baseline methods.