Hierarchical lifelong topic modeling using rules extracted from network communities

Abstract

Topic models extract latent concepts from texts in the form of topics. Lifelong topic models extend topic models by learning topics continuously based on accumulated knowledge from the past which is updated continuously as new information becomes available. Hierarchical topic modeling extends topic modeling by extracting topics and organizing them into a hierarchical structure. In this study, we combine the two and introduce hierarchical lifelong topic models. Hierarchical lifelong topic models not only allow to examine the topics at different levels of granularity but also allows to continuously adjust the granularity of the topics as more information becomes available. A fundamental issue in hierarchical lifelong topic modeling is the extraction of rules that are used to preserve the hierarchical structural information among the rules and will continuously update based on new information. To address this issue, we introduce a network communities based rule mining approach for hierarchical lifelong topic models (NHLTM). The proposed approach extracts hierarchical structural information among the rules by representing textual documents as graphs and analyzing the underlying communities in the graph. Experimental results indicate improvement of the hierarchical topic structures in terms of topic coherence that increases from general to specific topics.