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arXiv · 2406.10402

Determination of the Number of Topics Intrinsically: Is It Possible?

Victor Bulatov·Vasiliy Alekseev·Konstantin Vorontsov
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Abstract

The number of topics might be the most important parameter of a topic model. The topic modelling community has developed a set of various procedures to estimate the number of topics in a dataset, but there has not yet been a sufficiently complete comparison of existing practices. This study attempts to partially fill this gap by investigating the performance of various methods applied to several topic models on a number of publicly available corpora. Further analysis demonstrates that intrinsic methods are far from being reliable and accurate tools. The number of topics is shown to be a method- and a model-dependent quantity, as opposed to being an absolute property of a particular corpus. We conclude that other methods for dealing with this problem should be developed and suggest some promising directions for further research.

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Victor Bulatov, Vasiliy Alekseev, Konstantin Vorontsov. 2024-06-14. Determination of the Number of Topics Intrinsically: Is It Possible?. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67008-4_1

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