Abstract
Accurately representing the quantity and characteristics of users’ interest in certain topics is an important problem facing topic evolution researchers, particularly as it applies to modern online environments. Search engines can provide information retrieval for a specified topic from archived data, but fail to reflect changes in interest toward the topic over time in a structured way. This paper reviews notable research on topic evolution based on the probabilistic topic model from multiple aspects over the past decade. First, we introduce notations, terminology, and the basic topic model explored in the survey, then we summarize three categories of topic evolution based on the probabilistic topic model: the discrete time topic evolution model, the continuous time topic evolutionmodel, and the online topic evolution model. Next, we describe applications of the topic evolution model and attempt to summarize model generalization performance evaluation and topic evolution evaluation methods, as well as providing comparative experimental results for different models. To conclude the review, we pose some open questions and discuss possible future research directions.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allan J. Introduction to topic detection and tracking. Topic Detection And Tracking. The Information Retrieval Series, Vol 12. Springer US, 2002, 1–16
Allan J, Carbonell J G, Doddington G, Yamron J, Yang Y. Topic detection and tracking pilot study final report. In: Proceedings of the DARPA Broadcast News Transcription and Understanding Workshop. 1998, 194–218
Nallapati R, Feng A, Peng F, Allan J. Event threading within news topics. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2004, 446–453
Morinaga S, Yamanishi K. Tracking dynamics of topic trends using a finite mixture model. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2004, 811–816
Kumar R, Mahadevan U, Sivakumar D. A graph-theoretic approach to extract storylines from search results. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2004, 216–225
Lin F R, Huang F M, Liang C H. Individualized storyline-based news topic retrospection. In: Proceedings of Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Managing Diversity in Digital Enterprises. 2007
Ahmed A, Ho Q, Teo C H, Eisenstein J, Smola A J, Xing E P. Online inference for the infinite topic-cluster model: storylines from streaming text. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. 2011, 101–109
Hofmann T. Unsupervised learning by probabilistic latent semantic analysis. Machine Learning, 2001, 42(1): 177–196
Blei D M, Ng A Y, Jordan M I. Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2003, 3: 993–1022
Shan B, Li F. A survey of topic evolution based on LDA. Journal of Chinese Information Processing, 2010, 24(1): 43–49
Elshamy W. Continuous-time infinite dynamic topic models. Dissertation for the Doctoral Degree. Manhattan: Kansas State University, 2013
Daud A, Li J Z, Zhou L Z, Muhammad F. Knowledge discovery through directed probabilistic topic models: a survey. Frontiers of Computer Science in China, 2010, 4(2): 280–301
Steyvers M, Griffiths T. Probabilistic topic models. Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis, 2007, 427(2): 424–440
Blei D M, Lafferty J D. Dynamic topic models. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Machine Learning. 2006, 113–120
Blei D M, Lafferty J D. A correlated topic model of science. Annals of Applied Statistics, 2007, 1(1): 17–35
Blei DM, Griffiths T L, Jordan M I. The nested Chinese restaurant process and Bayesian nonparametric inference of topic hierarchies. Journal of the ACM, 2010, 57(2): 7
Blei D M, Carin L, Dunson D. Probabilistic topic models. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2010, 27(1): 55–65
Blei D M. Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 2012, 55(4): 77–84
Xing E P. On topic evolution. Technical Report CMU-CALD-05-115. 2005
Teh Y W, Jordan M I, Beal M J, Blei D M. Hierarchical dirichlet processes. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2006, 101: 1566–1581
Mei Q Z, Zhai C X. Discovering evolutionary theme patterns from text: an exploration of temporal text mining. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2005, 198–207
Nallapati R M, Ditmore S, Lafferty J D, Ung K. Multiscale topic tomography. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2007, 520–529
Ahmed A, Xing E P. Dynamic non-parametric mixture models and the recurrent Chinese restaurant process with application to evolutionary clustering. In: Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. 2008, 219–230
Ahmed A, Xing E P. Timeline: dynamic hierarchical Dirichlet process model for recovering birth/death and evolution of topics in text stream. In: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. 2010, 20–29
Wang J, Liu X H, Wang J L, Zhao W D. News topic evolution tracking by incorporating temporal information. Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2014, 496(12): 465–472
Wang X R, McCallum A. Topics over time: a non-markov continuoustime model of topical trends. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2006, 424–433
Wang C, Blei D, Heckerman D. Continuous time dynamic topic models. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. 2008, 579–586
Kawamae N. Trend analysis model: trend consists of temporal words, topics, and timestamps. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 2011, 317–326
Dubey A, Hefny A, Williamson S, Xing E P. A nonparametric mixture model for topic modeling over time. In: Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. 2013, 530–538
Li F F, Perona P. A Bayesian hierarchical model for learning natural scene categories. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2005, 524–531
Canini K P, Shi L, Griffiths T L. Online inference of topics with latent Dirichlet allocation. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. 2009, 65–72
Hoffman M, Bach F R, Blei D M. Online learning for latent dirichlet allocation. In: Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. 2010, 856–864
Sato I, Kurihara K, Nakagawa H. Deterministic single-pass algorithm for LDA. In: Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. 2010, 2074–2082
AlSumait L, Barbará D, Domeniconi C. On-line LDA: adaptive topic models for mining text streams with applications to topic detection and tracking. In: Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 2008, 3–12
Gohr, A, Hinneburg A, Schult R, Spiliopoulou M. Topic evolution in a stream of documents. In: Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. 2009, 859–870
Iwata T, Yamada T, Sakurai Y, Ueda N. Online multiscale dynamic topic models. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and DataMining. 2010, 663–672
Ahmed A, Ho Q, Eisenstein J, Xing E, Smola A J, Teo C H. Unified analysis of streaming news. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web. 2011, 267–276
Griffiths T L, Steyvers M. Finding scientific topics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004, 101 (suppl 1): 5228–5235
Hall D, Jurafsky D, Manning C D. Studying the history of ideas using topic models. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2008, 363–371
Bolelli L, Ertekin, Giles C L. Topic and trend detection in text collections using latent dirichlet allocation. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval. 2009, 776–780
Steyvers M, Smyth P, Rosen-Zvi M, Griffiths T. Probabilistic authortopic models for information discovery. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2004, 306–315
Rosen-Zvi M, Griffiths T, Steyvers M, Smyth P. The author-topic model for authors and documents. In: Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. 2004, 487–494
Nallapati R M, Ahmed A, Xing E P, Cohen W W. Joint latent topic models for text and citations. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2008, 542–550
Zhou D, Ji X, Zha H Y, Giles C L. Topic evolution and social interactions: how authors effect research. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2006, 248–257
He Q, Chen B, Pei J, Qiu B J, Mitra P, Giles L. Detecting topic evolution in scientific literature: how can citations help? In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2009, 957–966
Wang X L, Zhai C X, Roth D. Understanding evolution of research themes: a probabilistic generative model for citations. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2013, 1115–1123
Wang X H, Zhai C X, Hu X, Sproat R. Mining correlated bursty topic patterns from coordinated text streams. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2007, 784–793
Hong L J, Dom B, Gurumurthy S, Tsioutsiouliklis K. A timedependent topic model for multiple text streams. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2011, 832–840
Lin C X, Zhao B, Mei Q Z, Han J W. PET: a statistical model for popular events tracking in social communities. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2010, 929–938
Lin C X, Mei Q Z, Han J W, Jiang Y L, Danilevsky M. The joint inference of topic diffusion and evolution in social communities. In: Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 2011, 378–387
Tang X N, Yang C C. TUT: a statistical model for detecting trends, topics and user interests in social media. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2012, 972–981
Sasaki K, Yoshikawa T, Furuhashi T. Online topic model for twitter considering dynamics of user interests and topic trends. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2014, 1977–1985
Iwata T, Watanabe S, Yamada T, Ueda N. Topic tracking model for analyzing consumer purchase behavior. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2009, 1427–1432
Cai G Y, Peng L B, Wang Y. Topic detection and evolution analysis on microblog. In: Shi Z Z, Wu Z H, Leake D, et al. eds. Intelligent Information Processing VII. IFIP Adrances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol 432. Berlin: Springer,2014, 67–77
Wallach H M, Murray I, Salakhutdinov R, Mimno D. Evaluation methods for topic models. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning. 2009, 1105–1112
Saha A, Sindhwani V. Learning evolving and emerging topics in social media: a dynamic nmf approach with temporal regularization. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 2012, 693–702
Vaca C K, Mantrach A, Jaimes A, Saerens M. A time-based collective factorization for topic discovery and monitoring in news. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on World Wide Web. 2014, 527–538
Chen Y, Zhang H, Wu J J, Wang X G. Modeling emerging, evolving and fading topics using dynamic soft orthogonal nmf with sparse representation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 2015, 61–70
Globerson A, Chechik G, Pereira F, Tishby N. Euclidean embedding of co-occurrence data. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2007, 8(4): 2265–2295
Chang J, Boyd-Graber J L, Gerrish S, Wang C, Blei D M. Reading tea leaves: how humans interpret topic models. In: Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. 2009, 288–296
Wallach H M. Topic modeling: beyond bag of words. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning. 2006, 977–984
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions, which significantly contributed to improving the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Key Basic Research Project of China (973 Program) (2012CB316400), the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61471321, 61202400, 31300539, and 31570629), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LY15C140005, LY16F010004), Science and Technology Department of Zhejiang Province Public Welfare Project (2016C31G2010057, 2015C31004), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (172210261) and the Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Forestry Intelligent Monitoring and Information Technology Research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Houkui Zhou is a PhD student of the Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University (ZJU), China. He got his bachelor degree from Hangzhou Dianzi University, China in 2003 and his master degree from Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, ZJU in 2006. His research interests include cross-media analysis and mining and topic evolution.
Huimin Yu received the PhD degree in communication and electronic systems from the Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University (ZJU), China in 1996. He is currently a professor with the Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering and the State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, ZJU. His current research interests include cross-media data mining and analysis, and machine learning.
Roland Hu received the BS degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, China, and the PhD degree in audio-visual person recognition from the University of Southampton, UK in 2002 and 2007, respectively. He was a postdoctoral researcher with the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium from 2007 to 2009. Since 2009, he has been an assistant professor with the Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, China. His current research interests include computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and digital watermarking.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhou, H., Yu, H. & Hu, R. Topic evolution based on the probabilistic topic model: a review. Front. Comput. Sci. 11, 786–802 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5442-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5442-5