Community-Detection via Hashtag-Graphs for Semi-Supervised NMF Topic Models
Extracting topics from large collections of unstructured text-documents has
become a central task in current NLP applications and algorithms like NMF, LDA
as well as their generalizations are the well-established current state of the
art. However, especially when it comes to short text documents like Tweets,
these approaches often lead to unsatisfying results due to the sparsity of the
document-feature matrices.
Even though, several approaches have been proposed to overcome this sparsity
by taking additional information into account, these are merely focused on the
aggregation of similar documents and the estimation of word-co-occurrences.
This ultimately completely neglects the fact that a lot of topical-information
can be actually retrieved from so-called hashtag-graphs by applying common
community detection algorithms. Therefore, this paper outlines a novel approach
on how to integrate topic structures of hashtag graphs into the estimation of
topic models by connecting graph-based community detection and semi-supervised
NMF.
By applying this approach on recently streamed Twitter data it will be seen
that this procedure actually leads to more intuitive and humanly interpretable
topics.
Authors
Mattias Luber, Anton Thielmann, Christoph Weisser, Benjamin Säfken