Topic Cropping: Leveraging Latent Topics for the Analysis of Small Corpora

Topic modeling has gained a lot of popularity as a means for identifying and describing the topical structure of textual documents and whole corpora. There are, however, many document collections such as qualitative studies in the digital humanities that cannot easily benefit from this technology. The limited size of those corpora leads to poor quality topic models. Higher quality topic models can be learned by incorporating additional domain-specific documents with similar topical content. This, however, requires finding or even manually composing such corpora, requiring considerable effort. For solving this problem, we propose a fully automated adaptable process of

topic cropping

. For learning topics, this process automatically tailors a domain-specific Cropping corpus from a general corpus such as Wikipedia. The learned topic model is then mapped to the working corpus via topic inference. Evaluation with a real world data set shows that the learned topics are of higher quality than those learned from the working corpus alone. In detail, we analyzed the learned topics with respect to coherence, diversity, and relevance.