The distributional hypothesis states that similar words tend to have similar contexts in which they occur. Word embedding models exploit this hypothesis by learning word vectors based on the local context of words. Probabilistic topic models on the other hand utilize word co-occurrences across documents to identify topically related words. Due to their complementary nature, these models define different notions of word similarity, which, when combined, can produce better topical representations. In this paper we propose WELDA, a new type of topic model, which combines word embeddings (WE) with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to improve topic quality. We achieve this by estimating topic distributions in the word embedding space and exchanging selected topic words via Gibbs sampling from this space. We present an extensive evaluation showing that WELDA cuts runtime by at least 30% while outperforming other combined approaches with respect to topic coherence and for solving word intrusion tasks.

Comparative text mining extends from genre analysis and political bias detection to the revelation of cultural and geographic differences, through to the search for prior art across patents and scientific papers. These applications use cross-collection topic modeling for the exploration, clustering, and comparison of large sets of documents, such as digital libraries. However, topic modeling on documents from different collections is challenging because of domain-specific vocabulary. We present a cross-collection topic model combined with automatic domain term extraction and phrase segmentation. This model distinguishes collection-specific and collection-independent words based on information entropy and reveals commonalities and differences of multiple text collections. We evaluate our model on patents, scientific papers, newspaper articles, forum posts, and Wikipedia articles. In comparison to state-of-the-art cross-collection topic modeling, our model achieves up to 13% higher topic coherence, up to 4% lower perplexity, and up to 31% higher document classification accuracy. More importantly, our approach is the first topic model that ensures disjunct general and specific word distributions, resulting in clear-cut topic representations.

Research results manifest in large corpora of patents and scientific papers. However, both corpora lack a consistent taxonomy and references across different document types are sparse. Therefore, and because of contrastive, domain-specific language, recommending similar papers for a given patent (or vice versa) is challenging. We propose a hybrid recommender system that leverages topic distributions and key terms to recommend related work despite these challenges. As a case study, we evaluate our approach on patents and papers of two fields: medical and computer science. We find that topic-based recommenders complement term-based recommenders for documents with collection-specific language and increase mean average precision by up to 23%. As a result of our work, publications from both corpora form a joint digital library, which connects academia and industry.

In the past few years various government funding organizations such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation have provided access to large publicly-available on-line databases documenting the grants that they have funded over the past few decades. These databases provide an excellent opportunity for the application of statistical text analysis techniques to infer useful quantitative information about how funding patterns have changed over time. In this paper we analyze data from the National Cancer Institute (part of National Institutes of Health) and show how text classification techniques provide a useful starting point for analyzing how funding for cancer research has evolved over the past 20 years in the United States.