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Auteurs principaux: Magsarjav, Saranzaya, Humphries, Melissa, Tuke, Jonathan, Mitchell, Lewis
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12850
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author Magsarjav, Saranzaya
Humphries, Melissa
Tuke, Jonathan
Mitchell, Lewis
author_facet Magsarjav, Saranzaya
Humphries, Melissa
Tuke, Jonathan
Mitchell, Lewis
contents Topic modelling in Natural Language Processing uncovers hidden topics in large, unlabelled text datasets. It is widely applied in fields such as information retrieval, content summarisation, and trend analysis across various disciplines. However, probabilistic topic models can produce different results when rerun due to their stochastic nature, leading to inconsistencies in latent topics. Factors like corpus shuffling, rare text removal, and document elimination contribute to these variations. This instability affects replicability, reliability, and interpretation, raising concerns about whether topic models capture meaningful topics or just noise. To address these problems, we defined a new stability measure that incorporates accuracy and consistency and uses the generative properties of LDA to generate a new corpus with ground truth. These generated corpora are run through LDA 50 times to determine the variability in the output. We show that LDA can correctly determine the underlying number of topics in the documents. We also find that LDA is more internally consistent, as the multiple reruns return similar topics; however, these topics are not the true topics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12850
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying consistency and accuracy of Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Magsarjav, Saranzaya
Humphries, Melissa
Tuke, Jonathan
Mitchell, Lewis
Computation and Language
Topic modelling in Natural Language Processing uncovers hidden topics in large, unlabelled text datasets. It is widely applied in fields such as information retrieval, content summarisation, and trend analysis across various disciplines. However, probabilistic topic models can produce different results when rerun due to their stochastic nature, leading to inconsistencies in latent topics. Factors like corpus shuffling, rare text removal, and document elimination contribute to these variations. This instability affects replicability, reliability, and interpretation, raising concerns about whether topic models capture meaningful topics or just noise. To address these problems, we defined a new stability measure that incorporates accuracy and consistency and uses the generative properties of LDA to generate a new corpus with ground truth. These generated corpora are run through LDA 50 times to determine the variability in the output. We show that LDA can correctly determine the underlying number of topics in the documents. We also find that LDA is more internally consistent, as the multiple reruns return similar topics; however, these topics are not the true topics.
title Quantifying consistency and accuracy of Latent Dirichlet Allocation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12850