Topic modeling from network spread

Abstract

Topic modeling refers to the task of inferring, only from data, the abstract ``topics" that occur in a collection of content. In this paper we look at latent topic modeling in a setting where unlike traditional topic modeling (a) there are no/few features (like words in documents) that are directly indicative of content topics (e.g. un-annotated videos and images, URLs etc.), but (b) users share and view content over a social network. We provide a new algorithm for inferring both the topics in which every user is interested, and thus also the topics in each content piece. We study its theoretical performance and demonstrate its empirical effectiveness over standard topic modeling algorithms.