Topic Modeling

A topic model is a type of statistical model to determine abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents. Topic modeling is a frequently used text-mining tool employed in the discovery of hidden semantic structure in a body of text. Intuitively, given that a document is about a particular topic, it would be expected that certain words would appear in the document more or less frequently. A document typically is concerned with multiple topics in different proportions thus, in a document that is 10% about “A” and 90% about “B”, there would probably be about 9 times more “B” words than “A” words. The “topics” returned by topic modeling techniques are clusters of similar words. A topic model captures this notion in a mathematical framework, which allows the examination of a set of documents, based on the statistics of the words used in each document, what the topics might be, and what each document’s balance of topics is