Recent advancements in topic modeling have split into two main paths: efficient embedding-based methods that offer scalability but are often outperformed on standard clustering metrics, and Large Lang...
arXiv:2606. 28328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, text clustering has become a critical technique for applications including intent discovery, topic mining, and recommendation systems.
By Daoming Wan, Yizheng Huang, Jimmy X. Huang
TopicMerge is a multi-stage pipeline that combines efficient embedding-based clustering with Large Language Model (LLM) guidance to produce high-quality topic models. The method first over-segments a corpus into fine-grained micro-clusters, then iteratively merges them using an LLM that evaluates candidate pairs based on local context. Experiments on Bills and Wiki datasets demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art clustering performance while cutting LLM calls by more than 92% compared to document‑level approaches.
By Matthew Raffel, Lizhong Chen, Sai Munikoti, Sameera Horawalavithana
MonoTM is an interpretable topic modeling framework that separates the estimation of document–topic mixtures from the generation of topic descriptors. It uses sparse autoencoders to extract dense, interpretable features for mixture estimation, then learns topic descriptors from a distinct set of corpus‑grounded semantic features. This approach preserves global topic structure while providing more meaningful, semantic‑unit descriptors than traditional top‑word lists.
By Una Joh, Bei Yu
arXiv:2510. 18908v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) provide rich data for analyzing public discourse, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
By Wangjiaxuan Xin, Shuhua Yin, Shi Chen, Yaorong Ge
The paper introduces MARETopic, a training‑free framework that identifies topics by selecting rank‑based prototype documents from pretrained embeddings. By projecting embeddings onto a low‑dimensional manifold and building ranked neighborhood lists, a greedy algorithm picks exactly K exemplar texts whose neighborhoods cover the corpus. Two variants—MARETopic_Corr, which uses a query‑performance predictor and rank correlation, and MARETopic_Diff, which employs a rank‑based diffusion matrix—achieve higher purity and NMI on benchmark datasets and run significantly faster, while also improving topic coherence and vocabulary diversity through a novel Maximal Marginal Relevance step.
By Thiago C\'esar Castilho Almeida, Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette
arXiv:2512. 10092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data.
By Nick Jiang, Xiaoqing Sun, Lisa Dunlap, Lewis Smith, Neel Nanda
ClusterFusion is a hybrid text‑clustering framework that uses a large language model (LLM) as the core clustering engine, guided by lightweight embedding methods. The process involves embedding‑guided subset partitioning, LLM‑driven topic summarization, and LLM‑based topic assignment, allowing direct incorporation of domain knowledge and user preferences. Experiments on three public benchmarks and two new domain‑specific datasets show that ClusterFusion achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on standard tasks and significant gains in specialized domains, with the authors releasing a new dataset and benchmark results.
By Yiming Xu, Yuan Yuan, Vijay Viswanathan, Graham Neubig
arXiv:2607. 20556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In large-scale text analysis tasks, pre-trained language models are often used to embed text corpora for downstream analysis.
By Yan Zhu, Y. Chen, Rebecca Faust
The paper introduces a new method that uses embedding-based dynamic topic modeling to detect and measure topic drift at the comment level in a large dataset. By applying pretrained language models to generate contextualized embeddings for 12.7 billion Reddit comments from 2006 to 2022, the authors identify evolving topic clusters over time using unsupervised techniques. Their approach includes scalable modifications to existing methods and a null model comparison test, revealing that politically and socially contentious topics show significant directional drift, while areas like music and sports remain relatively stable.
BERTilda is an explainable framework for tracking topic lifecycles in longitudinal text streams. It discovers topics independently in each time window using an embedding‑based topic model, then links topics across adjacent windows via a temporal graph that uses both semantic similarity and a bidirectional coverage signal derived from tweet‑to‑topic attribution. The graph‑based rules identify continuations, splits, merges, disappearances, and unclear transitions, and the method achieves up to 87% agreement with human annotators on a gold‑standard subset.
By Cl\'audia Oliveira, \'Alvaro Figueira
arXiv:2511. 05913v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: New intent discovery (NID) seeks to recognize both new and known intents from unlabeled user utterances, which finds prevalent use in practical dialogue systems.
By Hongtao Wang, Renchi Yang, Wenqing Lin