Modeling topic

A topic model can help explore a collection of documents when their themes have not been labeled in advance. In Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA, each topic is a probability distribution over the vocabulary. Words with high probability can suggest a theme, such as a collection of election-related terms, but the mathematical output is not automatically a verified topic name. A person inspecting the words may assign a name that summarizes the pattern. Each document is modeled as a mixture of topics, so one article need not belong exclusively to one category. Blei, Ng, and Jordan introduced LDA in their 2003 paper. The generative formulation associates a document with a topic mixture, then selects topic assignments and words. In practice, observed documents are used to infer the unobserved topic structure. The bag-of-words treatment makes word order irrelevant to this model: changing the order without changing word counts does not supply new sequence information. A conventional finite LDA configuration requires a topic count K. Its usefulness should be evaluated rather than inferred solely from how appealing the top words look. BERTopic uses a different pipeline, commonly starting with document embeddings, dimensionality reduction, and clustering. It then represents clusters with class-based TF-IDF, or c-TF-IDF, to identify characteristic words. Document clustering and topic-word representation are different stages. Embeddings can contribute semantic information while c-TF-IDF describes the resulting groups. Such a representation does not by itself prove that a cluster corresponds to a single meaningful real-world theme.