Topic Models for Text Data: Quick Pointers to Various Resources

Topic Modeling Softare

• MATLAB software. This is a comprehensive MATLAB software package that Mark Steyvers and Tom Griffiths have made available for research, using the Gibbs sampling approach described originally in Griffiths and Steyvers, 2004.
• Discrete Components Analysis code from Wray Buntine and colleagues in Finland (implements the topic model plus other similar hidden variable models).
• David Blei's Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) code in C, using variational learning.

Introductory Papers on Topic Models

• Probabilistic Topic Models, Steyvers and Griffiths (2006). A review paper on topic modeling that is a useful starting point for covering the basic concepts, with illustrative examples.
• There are many other papers now published on topic models: keywords to try in search engines include "topic models" and "LDA".

Examples of Web Browsers built using Topic Models

• A topic-based browser of UCI and UCSD faculty research interests built by Dave Newman and Arthur Asuncion at UCI in 2005.
• A topic-based browser for 330,000 New York Times articles, by Dave Newman, UCI.
• The author-topic browser, a JAVA-based applet that illustrates the author-topic model (Rosen-Zvi et al, 2004) using both CiteSeer and NIPS data sets. [Note: this has been down recently in 2007 since we moved to a new building at UCI and have not gotten the server back up and running yet]
• Wray Buntine's topic-based search interface to Wikipedia.
• Dave Blei and John Lafferty's browsable 100-topic model of journal articles from Science.