In plain words: Instead of letting the corpus pick its own topics, this uses a few category names you supply to shape a word map, then repeatedly pulls out each category's best terms. Its topics were clearer and more distinct than unsupervised ones and improved keyword-based classification.
Abstract · Discriminative Topic Mining via Category-Name Guided Text Embedding
Mining a set of meaningful and distinctive topics automatically from massive text corpora has broad applications. Existing topic models, however, typically work in a purely unsupervised way, which often generate topics that do not fit users' particular needs and yield suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. We propose a new task, discriminative topic mining, which leverages a set of user-provided category names to mine discriminative topics from text corpora. This new task not only helps a user understand clearly and distinctively the topics he/she is most interested in, but also benefits directly keyword-driven classification tasks. We develop CatE, a novel category-name guided text embedding method for discriminative topic mining, which effectively leverages minimal user guidance to learn a discriminative embedding space and discover category representative terms in an iterative manner. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments to show that CatE mines high-quality set of topics guided by category names only, and benefits a variety of downstream applications including weakly-supervised classification and lexical entailment direction identification.
Yu Meng, Jiaxin Huang, Guangyuan Wang, Zihan Wang, Chao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Jiawei Han
arXiv:1908.07162 · cs.CL, cs.IR · submitted Aug 20, 2019 · updated Jan 27, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · WWW 2020. (Code: https://github.com/yumeng5/CatE)