4: Topic Models

Jack Blumenau

Course Outline

  1. Representing Text as Data (I): Bag-of-Words
  2. Similarity, Difference, and Complexity
  3. Language Models (I): Supervised Learning for Text Data
  4. Language Models (II): Topic Models 👈
  5. Collecting Text Data
  6. Causal Inference with Text
  7. Representing Text as Data (II): Word Embeddings
  8. Representing Text as Data (III): Word Sequences
  9. Language Models (III): Neural Networks, Transfer Learning and Transformer Models
  10. Language Models (IV): Applying Large Language Models in Social Science Research

Topic Models

Topic Models

  • Topic models allow us to cluster similar documents in a corpus together.

  • Don’t we already have tools for that?

  • Yes! Dictionaries and supervised learning.

  • So what do topic models add?

A motivating example

  • Data: UK House of Commons’ debates (PMQs)

    • \(\approx 30000\) parliamentary speeches from 1997 to 2015
    • \(\approx 3000\) unique words
    • \(\approx 2m\) total words

  • Sample/feature selection decisions

    • Sample selection: Only PMQs (\(\approx 3\%\) of total speeches)
    • Feature selection: Removed frequently occurring & very rare words
    • Feature selection: All words have been “stemmed”

Results of a 30-topic model

Topic Models

  • Topic models offer an automated procedure for discovering the main “themes” in an unstructured corpus

  • They require no prior information, training set, or labelling of texts before estimation

  • They allow us to automatically organise, understand, and summarise large archives of text data.

  • Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is the most common approach (Blei et al., 2003), and one that underpins more complex models

  • Topic models are an example of mixture models:

    • Documents can contain multiple topics
    • Words can belong to multiple topics

Topic Models as Language Models

  • Last week, we introduced the idea of a probabilistic language model

    • These models describe a story about how documents are generated using probability

  • A language model is represented by a probability distribution over words in a vocabulary

  • The Naive Bayes text classification model is one example of a generative language model where

    • We estimate separate probability distributions for each category of interest
    • Each document is assigned to a single category

  • Topic models are also language models

    • We estimate separate probability distributions for each topic
    • Each document is described as belonging to multiple topics

What is a “topic”?

A “topic” is a probability distribution over a fixed word vocabulary.

  • Consider a vocabulary: gene, dna, genetic, data, number, computer

  • When speaking about genetics, you will:

    • frequently use the words “gene”, “dna” & “genetic”
    • infrequently use the words “data”, “number” & “computer”

  • When speaking about computation, you will:

    • frequently use the words “data”, “number” & “computation”
    • infrequently use the words “gene”, “dna” & “genetic”
Topic gene dna genetic data number computer
Genetics 0.4 0.25 0.3 0.02 0.02 0.01
Computation 0.02 0.01 0.02 0.3 0.4 0.25

Note that no word has probability of exactly 0 under either topic.

What is a “document”?

  • In a topic model, each document is described as being composed of a mixture of corpus-wide topics

  • For each document, we find the topic proportions that maximize the probability that we would observe the words in that particular document

Imagine we have two documents with the following word counts

Document word counts
Doc gene dna genetic data number computer
A 2 3 1 3 2 1
B 2 4 2 1 2 1
Topic probability distributions
Topic gene dna genetic data number computer
Genetics 0.4 0.25 0.3 0.02 0.02 0.01
Computation 0.02 0.01 0.02 0.3 0.4 0.25

What is the probability of observing Document A’s word counts under the “Genetics” topic?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_A|\mu_{\text{Genetics}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{A,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Genetics},j}^{W_{A,j}} \\ &=& 0.0000000798336 \end{eqnarray}\]

What is the probability of observing Document A’s word counts under the “Computation” topic?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_A|\mu_{\text{Computation}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{A,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Computation},j}^{W_{A,j}} \\ &=& 0.0000000287401 \end{eqnarray}\]

What is the probability of observing Document A’s word counts under a equal mixture of the both topics?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_A|\mu_{\text{Comp+Genet}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{A,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Comp+Genet},j}^{W_{A,j}} \\ &=& 0.001210891 \end{eqnarray}\]

What is the probability of observing Document B’s word counts under the “Genetics” topic?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_B|\mu_{\text{Genetics}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{B,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Genetics},j}^{W_{B,j}} \\ &=& 0.0000112266 \end{eqnarray}\]

What is the probability of observing Document B’s word counts under the “Computation” topic?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_B|\mu_{\text{Computation}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{B,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Computation},j}^{W_{B,j}} \\ &=& 0.00000000004790016 \end{eqnarray}\]

What is the probability of observing Document B’s word counts under a equal mixture of the both topics?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_B|\mu_{\text{Comp+Genet}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{B,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Comp+Genet},j}^{W_{B,j}} \\ &=& 0.0007378866 \end{eqnarray}\]

What is the probability of observing Document B’s word counts under a 60-40 mixture of the both topics?

\[\begin{eqnarray} P(W_B|\mu_{\text{Comp+Genet}}) &=& \frac{M_i!}{\prod_{j=1}^JW_{B,j}!}\prod_{j=1}^J\mu_{\text{Comp+Genet},j}^{W_{B,j}} \\ &=& 0.001262625 \end{eqnarray}\]

Implication: Our documents may be better described in terms of mixtures of different topics than by one topic alone.

Topic Models

A topic model simultaneously estimates two sets of probabilities

  1. The probability of observing each word for each topic

  2. The probability of observing each topic in each document

These quantities can then be used to organise documents by topic, assess how topics vary across documents, etc.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

LDA is a probabilistic language model.

We assume that each document \(d\) in the corpus is “generated” as follows:

  1. A set of \(K\) topics exists before the data
    • Each topic \(k\) is a probability distribution over words (\(\beta\))
  2. A specific mix of those topics is randomly extracted to generate a document
    • More precisely, this mix is a specific probability distribution over topics (\(\theta\))
  3. Each word in a document is generating by:
    • First, choosing a topic \(k\) at random from the probability distribution over topics \(\theta\)
    • Then, choosing a word \(w\) at random from the topic-specific probability distribition over documents (\(\beta_k\))

However, we only observe documents!

The goal of LDA is to estimate hidden parameters (\(\beta\) and \(\theta\)) starting from \(w\).

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

  • The researcher picks a number of topics, \(K\).
  • Each topic (\(k\)) is a distribution over words
  • Each document (\(d\)) is a mixture of corpus-wide topics
  • Each word (\(w\)) is drawn from one of those topics

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

  • In reality, we only observe the documents
  • The other structure are hidden variables
  • Our goal is to infer the hidden variables
  • Topic modelling allows us to extrapolate backwards from a collection of documents to infer the “topics” that could have generated them.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

  • The LDA model is a Bayesian mixture model for discrete data which describes how the documents in a dataset were created

  • The number of topics, \(K\), is selected by the researcher

  • Each of the \(K\) topics is a probability distribution over a fixed vocabulary of \(N\) words

    • Modeled as a Dirichlet distribution

  • Each of the \(D\) documents is a probability distribution over the \(K\) topics

    • Modeled as a Dirichlet distribution

  • Each word in each document is drawn from the topic-specific probability distribution over words

    • Modeled as a multinomial distribution

Probability Distributions Review

  • A probability distribution is a function that gives the probabilities of the occurrence of different possible outcomes for a random variable

  • Probability distributions are defined by their parameters

    • E.g. In a normal distribution, \(\mu\) describes the mean and \(\sigma^2\) describes the variance

  • Different parameter values change the distribution’s shape and describe the probabilities of the different events

    • E.g. If \(\sigma_1^2 > \sigma_2^2\), then \(N(\mu, \sigma_1^2)\) has higer variance, fatter tails, describing a higher probability of extreme values

  • The notation “\(\sim\)” means to “draw” from the distribution

    • E.g. \(x \sim N(0,1)\) means to draw one value from a standard normal, which might result in \(X=1.123\)

  • There are two key distributions that we need to know about to understand topic models: the Multinomial and the Dirichlet distributions

Multinomial Distribution

  • The multinomial distribution is a probability distribution describing the results of a random variable that can take on one of K possible categories

  • The multinomial distribution depicted has probabilities \([0.2, 0.7, 0.1]\)

  • A draw (of size one) from a multinomial distribution returns one of the categories of the distribution

    • E.g. \(c \sim \text{Multinomial}(1,[0.2, 0.7, 0.1])\) might return \(c = a\)

  • A draw of a larger size from a multinomial distribution returns several categories of the distribution in proportion to their probabilities

    • E.g. \(C \sim \text{Multinomial}(10,[0.2, 0.7, 0.1])\) might return \(c_1 = a\), \(c_2 = b\), \(c_3 = b\) etc.

  • We have seen this before! Naive Bayes uses the multinomial distribution to describe the probability of observing words in different categories of documents.

Dirichlet Distribution

  • The Dirichlet distribution is a distribution over the simplex, i.e., positive vectors that sum to one

  • A draw from a dirichlet distribution returns a vector of positive numbers that sum to one

    • E.g. \(b \sim \text{Dirichlet}(\alpha)\) might return \(b = [0.2, 0.7, 0.1]\)

  • In other words, we can think of draws from a Dirichlet distribution being themselves multinomial distributions

  • The parameter \(\alpha\) controls the sparsity of the draws from the Dirichlet distribution.

    • When \(\alpha\) is larger, the probabilities will be more evenly spread across categories
    • When \(\alpha\) is smaller, more probability mass will be allocated to particular categories

p = [0.21,0.5,0.28]

p = [0.22,0.6,0.18]

p = [0.37,0.2,0.43]

LDA Generative Process

LDA assumes a generative process for documents:

  1. Each topic is a probability distribution over words

    • \(\beta_k \sim \mathsf{Dirichlet}(\eta)\), whith \(\beta_{k} \in (0,1)\) and \(\sum_{j=1}^J\beta_{j,k} = 1\)
    • \(\rightarrow\) probability that each word (\(w\)) occurs in a given topic (\(k\))

  1. For each document, draw a probability distribution over topics

    • \(\theta_d \sim \mathsf{Dirichlet}(\alpha)\), with \(\theta_{d,k} \in [0,1]\) and \(\sum_{k=1}^K\theta_{d,k} = 1\)
    • \(\rightarrow\) probability that each topic (\(k\)) occurs in a given document (\(d\))

  1. For each word in each document

    • Draw one of \(K\) topics from the distribution over topics \(\theta_d\)

      • \(z_i \sim \mathsf{Multinomial}(\theta_d)\)
      • \(\rightarrow\) topic indicator of word \(i\)

    • Given \(z_i\), draw one of \(N\) words from the distribution over words \(\beta_k\)

      • \(w_i \sim \mathsf{Multinomial}(\beta_{z_i})\)
      • \(\rightarrow\) actual word of word \(i\)

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)

LDA as a graphical model

  • Nodes are random variables; edges indicate dependence.
  • Shaded nodes are observed; unshaded nodes are hidden.
  • Plates indicate replicated variables.
  • \(W_{d,i}\) observed word (word level)
  • \(Z_{d,i}\) topic assignment (word level)
  • \(\theta_d\) topic proportions (document level)
  • \(\beta_k\) probability distribution over words (topic level)
  • \(\alpha\) proportions parameter (corpus level)
  • \(\eta\) topic parameter (corpus level)
  • \(\beta_k \sim \text{Dirichlet}(\eta)\)
  • \(\theta_d \sim \text{Dirichlet}(\alpha)\)
  • \(Z_{i,d} \sim \text{Multinomial}(\theta_d)\)
  • \(W_{d,i} \sim \text{Multinomial}(\beta_{z_i})\)

Note: \(\eta\) and \(\alpha\) govern the of the draws from the dirichlet. As they \(\rightarrow 0\), the multinomials become more sparse.

  • From a collection of documents, infer

    • Per-document topic proportions \(\theta_d\)
    • Per-corpus topic distributions \(\beta_k\)

  • Then use estimates of these parameters to perform the task at hand \(\rightarrow\) information retrieval, document similarity, exploration, and others.

LDA Estimation

  • Assuming the documents have been generated in such a way, in return makes it possible to back out the shares of topics within documents and the share of words within topics

  • Estimation of the LDA model is done in a Bayesian framework

  • Our \(Dir(\alpha)\) and \(Dir(\eta)\) are the prior distributions of the \(\theta_d\) and \(\beta_k\)

  • We use Bayes’ rule to update these prior distributions to obtain a posterior distribution for each \(\theta_d\) and \(\beta_k\)

  • The means of these posterior distributions are the outputs of statistical packages and which we use to investigate the \(\theta_d\) and \(\beta_k\)

  • Estimation is performed using either collapsed Gibbs sampling or variational methods

  • Fortunately, for us these are easily implemented in R

Why does LDA “work”?

  • LDA trades off two goals.

    1. For each document, allocate its words to as few topics as possible (\(\alpha\))
    2. For each topic, assign high probability to as few terms as possible (\(\eta\))

  • These goals are at odds.

    1. Putting a document in a single topic makes (2) hard: All of its words must have probability under that topic.

    2. Putting very few words in each topic makes (1) hard: To cover a document’s words, it must assign many topics to it.

  • Trading off these goals finds groups of tightly co-occurring words

LDA output

Imagine we have \(D = 1000\) documents, \(J = 10,000\) words, and \(K = 3\) topics.

The key outputs of the topic model are the \(\beta\) and \(\theta\) matrices:

\[\begin{equation} \theta = \underbrace{\begin{pmatrix} \theta_{1,1} & \theta_{1,2} & \theta_{1,3}\\ \theta_{2,1} & \theta_{2,2} & \theta_{2,3}\\ ... & ... & ...\\ \theta_{D,1} & \theta_{D,2} & \theta_{D,3}\\ \end{pmatrix}}_{D\times K} = \underbrace{\begin{pmatrix} 0.7 & 0.2 & 0.1\\ 0.1 & 0.8 & 0.1\\ ... & ... & ...\\ 0.3 & 0.3 & 0.4\\ \end{pmatrix}}_{1000 \times 3} \end{equation}\]

\[\begin{equation} \beta = \underbrace{\begin{pmatrix} \beta_{1,1} & \beta_{1,2} & ... & \beta_{1,J}\\ \beta_{2,1} & \beta_{2,2} & ... & \beta_{2,J}\\ \beta_{3,1} & \beta_{3,2} & ... & \beta_{3,J}\\ \end{pmatrix}}_{K\times J} = \underbrace{\begin{pmatrix} 0.04 & 0.0001 & ... & 0.003\\ 0.0004 & 0.001 & ... & 0.00005\\ 0.002 & 0.0003 & ... & 0.0008\\ \end{pmatrix}}_{3 \times 10,000} \end{equation}\]

LDA example

  • Data: UK House of Commons’ debates (PMQs)

    • \(\approx 30000\) parliamentary speeches from 1997 to 2015
    • \(\approx 3000\) unique words
    • \(\approx 2m\) total words
Rows: 27,885
Columns: 4
$ name         <chr> "Ian Bruce", "Tony Blair", "Denis MacShane", "Tony Blair"…
$ party        <chr> "Conservative", "Labour", "Labour", "Labour", "Liberal De…
$ constituency <chr> "South Dorset", "Sedgefield", "Rotherham", "Sedgefield", …
$ body         <chr> "In a written answer, the Treasury has just it made clear…
  • Estimate a range of topic models (\(K \in \{20,30,...,100\}\)) using the topicmodels package

LDA example

Implementation in R

library(quanteda)
library(topicmodels)

## Create corpus
pmq_corpus <- pmq %>% 
  corpus(text_field = "body")

pmq_dfm <- pmq_corpus %>%
  tokens(remove_punct = TRUE) %>%
  dfm() %>%
  dfm_remove(stopwords("en")) %>%
  dfm_wordstem() %>%
  dfm_trim(min_termfreq = 5)

## Convert for usage in 'topicmodels' package
pmq_tm_dfm <- pmq_dfm %>%
  convert(to = 'topicmodels')
## Estimate LDA
ldaOut <- LDA(pmq_tm_dfm, k = 40)


save(ldaOut, file = "../data/scripts/ldaOut_40.Rdata")

LDA example

We will make use of the following score to visualise the posterior topics:

\[ \text{term-score}_{k,v} = \hat{\beta}_{k,v}\log\left(\frac{\hat{\beta}_{k,v}}{(\prod_{j=1}^{K}\hat{\beta}_{j,v})^{\frac{1}{K}}}\right) \]

  • The first term, \(\hat{\beta}_{k,v}\), is the probability of term \(v\) in topic \(k\) and is akin to the term frequency
  • The second term down-weights terms that have high probability under all topics

This formulation is akin to the TFIDF term score

Implementation in R

# Extract estimated betas
topics <- tidy(ldaOut, matrix = "beta")

# Calculate the term scores

top_terms <- topics %>%
  group_by(term) %>%
  mutate(beta_k = prod(beta)^(1/20)) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  mutate(term_score = beta*log(beta/(beta_k))) %>%
  group_by(topic) %>%
  slice_max(term_score, n = 10)

# Extract the terms with the largest scores per topic

top_terms$term[top_terms$topic==3] 
 [1] "economi"  "econom"   "interest" "plan"     "rate"     "countri" 
 [7] "deficit"  "s"        "growth"   "debt"    
top_terms$term[top_terms$topic==19]
 [1] "forc"        "iraq"        "defenc"      "british"     "afghanistan"
 [6] "troop"       "secur"       "arm"         "war"         "weapon"

LDA example

LDA example

Top Document by Topic

report.inquiri.review.publish.committe.commiss.inform (29%)
In relation to all those issues, the Intelligence and Security Committee is at full liberty to go through all the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments and produce a report on them. Because of the importance of the issue, it is only right that a report be published so that people can make a judgment on it. However, the claims that have been made are simply false. In particular, the claim that the readiness of Saddam to use weapons within 45 minutes of an order to use them was a point inserted in the dossier at the behest of No. 10 is completely and totally untrue. Furthermore, the allegation that the 45-minute claim provoked disquiet among the intelligence community, which disagreed with its inclusion in the dossier I have discussed it, as I said, with the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee is also completely and totally untrue. Instead of hearing from one or many anonymous sources, I suggest that if people have any evidence, they actually produce it.


Other topics in document:

said.say.wrong.chancellor.listen.think.just (7%)
howev.cours.problem.reason.way.must.respect (6%)
act.protect.case.law.countri.use.peopl (5%)

busi.bank.scheme.small.help.financi.govern (30%)
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving me an opportunity to say, in addition, what we are doing to help small businesses. The key issues for small and medium-sized enterprises are cash flow, and, to some extent, access to finance, as I have just said. They need to be helped through this critical period. Late payment problems, which have intensified, with all firms on average lengthening the time it takes to pay their suppliers, including SMEs, go beyond agreed terms. The Government can ease the situation, and we will help cash flow through prompt payment. The Government have already agreed to move their procurement rules from payments within 30 days to a commitment to pay as soon as possible. In the current climate, we need to go further, with a harder target. We will therefore aim to make SME payments within 10 days. The Government will pick up the cost of that, but it is a small price for greatly increasing cash flow associated with 8 billion of contracts for SMEs. As I announced last weekend, we propose that the European Investment Bank increase its loans worth up to 4 billion to United Kingdom banks for use by small and medium-sized enterprises. We are now pressing for further additional funding to be advanced, and for UK banks to be able to ensure that they take up the full funding available for SMEs. The Government will, of course, review the impact of any regulatory measures already agreed, but let me make it clear that we are doing, and will do, everything we can to assist SMEs throughout this period. Our restructuring of the banks is designed to ensure that, although it is difficult to achieve, credit lines can remain open to SMEs on a commercial basis. We will not accept that banks should cull their credit lines to eliminate their own exposure to risk, so we will do everything we can to help the 4 million small businesses of this country.


Other topics in document:

can.assur.give.ensur.support.possibl.work (9%)
countri.part.chang.world.import.need.play (6%)
money.spend.million.invest.billion.extra.put (5%)

local.constitu.council.area.author.communiti.region (26%)
In March we introduced a new local green space designation to protect green spaces not just for great crested newts and landscape painters but for urban and suburban communities such as Leckhampton, Warden Hill and Whaddon in my constituency. Can the Prime Minister reassure local councils that they can and should use this new designation and that it has not been undermined by any recent pronouncements?


Other topics in document:

act.protect.case.law.countri.use.peopl (5%)
can.assur.give.ensur.support.possibl.work (4%)
minist.prime.deputi.confirm.failur.realiti.watch (4%)

Advantages and Disadvantages of LDA

Advantages

  • Automatically finds substantively interesting collections of words
  • Automatically labels documents in “meaningful” ways
  • Easily scaled to large corpora (millions of documents)
  • Requires very little prior work (no manual labelling of texts/dictionary construction etc)

Disadvantages

  • Generated topics may not reflect substantive interest of researcher
  • Many estimated topics may be redundant for research question
  • Requires extensive post-hoc interpretation of topics
  • Sensitivity to number of topics selected (what is the best choice for \(K\)?)

LDA Example (Alvero et al, 2021)

LDA Example (Alvero et al, 2021)

  • Policy problem: Performance in standardised tests is strongly correlated with income, creating the potential for bias against lower-income students.

  • Research question: Are other components of admission files – such as written essays – less correlated with income than SATs?

  • Research Design:

    • Topic model (\(k = 70\)) applied to 60k student admission essays.
    • Calculate correlation between a) topics and SAT scores, b) topics and student family income.
    • Additional analysis of essay “style” (using the LIWC dictionary)

LDA Example (Alvero et al, 2021)

LDA Example (Alvero et al, 2021)

Conclusions

  1. Topical content strongly predicts household income

  2. Topical content strongly predicts SAT scores

  3. Even conditional on income, topics predict SAT scores

“Our results strongly suggest that the imprint of social class will be found in even the fuzziest of application materials.”

Break

Structural Topic Model (STM)

Extending LDA

  • LDA can be embedded in more complicated models, embodying further intuitions about the structure of the texts.

    • E.g., it can be used in models that account for syntax, authorship, word sense, dynamics, correlation, hierarchies, and other structure.

  • The data generating distribution can be changed. We can apply mixed-membership assumptions to many kinds of data.

    • E.g., we can build models of images, social networks, music, purchase histories, computer code, genetic data, and other types.

  • The posterior can be used in creative ways.

    • E.g., we can use inferences in information retrieval, recommendation, similarity, visualization, summarization, and other applications.

LDA Extensions

  1. Correlated Topic Model (CTM)

    • LDA assumes that topics are uncorrelated across the corpus
    • The correlated topic model allows topics to be correlated
    • Closer approximation to true document structure, but estimation is slower

  1. Dynamic Topic Model (DTM)

    • LDA assumes that topics are fixed across documents
    • In some settings, we have documents from many different time periods
    • The assumption that topics are fixed may not be sensible
    • The dynamic topic model allows topical content to vary smoothly over time

  1. Structural Topic Model (STM)

    • Social scientists are typically interested in how topics vary with covariates
    • The structural topic model incorporates covariates into the LDA model
    • When estimated without covariates, the STM is the same as the CTM

Structural Topic Model

  • Typically, when estimating topic models we are interested in how some covariate is associated with the prevalence of topic usage (Gender, date, political party, etc)

  • The Structural Topic Model (STM) allows for the inclusion of arbitrary covariates of interest into the generative model

  • Topic prevalence is allowed to vary according to the covariates \(X\)

    • Each document has its own prior distribution over topics, which is defined by its covariates, rather than sharing a global mean

  • Topical content can also vary according to the covariates \(Y\)

    • Word use within a topic can differ for different groups of speakers/writers

Structural topic model

Topic prevalence model:

  • Draw topic proportions (\(\theta\)) from a logistic normal generalised linear model based on covariates \(X\)
  • This allows the expected document-topic proportions to vary by covariates, rather than from a single shared prior
  • \(\gamma\) coefficients can be interpreted as in regression: the expected change in \(\theta_k\) for a unit change in X

Topical content model:

  • The \(\beta\) coefficients, the word probabilities for a given topic, are allowed to vary according to the covariates \(Y\)
  • Differences in \(beta\) capture how documents with different covariates use words differently within a given topic

Structural Topic Model Application

  • In the legislative domain, we might be interested in the degree to which MPs from different parties represent distinct interests in their parliamentary questions
  • We can use the STM to analyse how topic prevalence varies by party

  • Specify a linear model with:

    • the topic proportions of speech \(d\), by legislator \(i\) as the outcome
    • the party of legislator \(i\) as the predictor

\[ \theta_{dk} = \alpha + \gamma_{1k}*\text{labour}_{d(i)} \]

  • The \(\gamma_{k}\) coefficients give the estimated difference in topic proportions for Labour and Conservative legislators for each topic

Structural Topic Model Application

library(stm)

## Estimate STM
stmOut <- stm(
            documents = pmq_dfm,
            prevalence = ~party.reduced,
            K = 30,
            seed = 123
            )
               
save(stmOut, file = "stmOut.Rdata")

Structural Topic Model Application

labelTopics(stmOut)
Topic 1 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: minist, prime, govern, s, tell, confirm, ask 
     FREX: prime, minist, confirm, failur, paymast, lack, embarrass 
     Lift: protectionist, roadshow, harrison, booki, arrog, googl, pembrokeshir 
     Score: prime, minist, s, confirm, protectionist, govern, tell 
Topic 2 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: chang, review, made, target, fund, meet, depart 
     FREX: climat, flood, review, chang, environ, emiss, carbon 
     Lift: 2050, consequenti, parrett, dredg, climat, greenhous, barnett 
     Score: chang, flood, climat, review, target, environ, emiss 
Topic 3 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: servic, health, nhs, care, hospit, nation, wait 
     FREX: cancer, patient, nhs, health, hospit, gp, doctor 
     Lift: horton, scotsman, wellb, clinician, herceptin, polyclin, healthcar 
     Score: health, nhs, servic, hospit, cancer, patient, nurs 
Topic 4 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: decis, vote, made, parti, elect, propos, debat 
     FREX: vote, liber, debat, scottish, decis, recommend, scotland 
     Lift: calman, gould, imc, wakeham, in-built, ipsa, jenkin 
     Score: vote, democrat, decis, parti, debat, liber, elect 
Topic 5 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: secretari, said, state, last, week, inquiri, report 
     FREX: deputi, warn, resign, inquiri, alleg, statement, servant 
     Lift: donnel, gus, revolutionari, sixsmith, column, bend, coulson 
     Score: secretari, deputi, inquiri, committe, said, state, alleg 
Topic 6 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: northern, ireland, meet, agreement, process, talk, peopl 
     FREX: ireland, northern, agreement, ira, down, sinn, decommiss 
     Lift: clamour, haass, tibetan, dalai, lama, tibet, presbyterian 
     Score: ireland, northern, agreement, peac, meet, process, down 
Topic 7 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: hous, home, build, need, common, plan, social 
     FREX: rent, hous, afford, properti, buy, lesson, site 
     Lift: fairi, rung, rent, greenfield, owner-occupi, bed-and-breakfast, tenant 
     Score: hous, home, build, rent, afford, common, fairi 
Topic 8 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: year, offic, polic, last, month, ago, two 
     FREX: four, three, ago, promis, month, five, six 
     Lift: templ, eye-catch, dixon, folder, paperwork, cutback, mug 
     Score: year, polic, crime, offic, figur, promis, month 
Topic 9 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: countri, world, peopl, forc, troop, afghanistan, aid 
     FREX: africa, taliban, zimbabw, aid, afghan, troop, g8 
     Lift: mbeki, madrassah, mandela, shi'a, thabo, non-agricultur, zimbabwean 
     Score: afghanistan, troop, iraq, iraqi, aid, afghan, africa 
Topic 10 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: bank, busi, energi, price, action, financi, take 
     FREX: price, bank, lend, energi, market, regul, financi 
     Lift: contagion, lender, recapitalis, depositor, okay, payday, ofgem 
     Score: bank, energi, price, busi, market, regul, okay 
Topic 11 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: school, educ, children, univers, parent, student, teacher 
     FREX: pupil, student, school, teacher, educ, fee, univers 
     Lift: 11-plus, grant-maintain, meal, numeraci, underachiev, learner, per-pupil 
     Score: school, educ, children, univers, teacher, student, pupil 
Topic 12 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: hon, right, friend, member, agre, may, mr 
     FREX: member, friend, right, hon, york, witney, richmond 
     Lift: dorri, dewar, cowdenbeath, kirkcaldi, nadin, hain, neath 
     Score: friend, hon, right, member, mr, dorri, agre 
Topic 13 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: per, cent, 20, 10, 50, increas, 100 
     FREX: cent, per, 50, 15, 20, 60, 40 
     Lift: unrealist, slaughtermen, ppp, cent, outbreak, per, maff 
     Score: per, cent, 20, 50, unrealist, 15, billion 
Topic 14 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: mr, money, word, taxpay, speaker, public, much 
     FREX: speaker, mail, strike, taxpay, gold, valu, blair 
     Lift: davo, measl, jab, trussel, brightsid, mail, spiv 
     Score: mr, speaker, taxpay, davo, word, strike, mail 
Topic 15 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: number, increas, result, peopl, train, year, addit 
     FREX: number, train, overal, recruit, 1997, equip, increas 
     Lift: stubborn, ta, midwiferi, largest-ev, 180,000, dentist, improvis 
     Score: number, increas, train, invest, 1997, equip, defenc 
Topic 16 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: pension, benefit, peopl, help, work, million, poverti 
     FREX: disabl, pension, post, poverti, benefit, payment, retir 
     Lift: adair, eyesight, off-peak, sub-post, sub-postmast, over-75, concessionari 
     Score: pension, benefit, disabl, post, poverti, child, welfar 
Topic 17 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: law, act, legisl, crime, prison, peopl, measur 
     FREX: prison, asylum, crimin, releas, deport, offenc, law 
     Lift: conduc, investigatori, porn, indetermin, parol, pre-releas, deport 
     Score: prison, crime, crimin, sentenc, law, asylum, drug 
Topic 18 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: conserv, govern, parti, spend, polici, money, gentleman 
     FREX: conserv, spend, oppos, tori, parti, previous, polici 
     Lift: snooper, attle, bawl, saatchi, family-friend, tori, chef 
     Score: conserv, spend, parti, oppos, money, cut, billion 
Topic 19 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: european, union, britain, europ, british, countri, rule 
     FREX: european, europ, treati, currenc, eu, union, constitut 
     Lift: overtaken, super-st, tidying-up, super-pow, lafontain, isc, lisbon 
     Score: european, union, europ, referendum, treati, constitut, britain 
Topic 20 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: unit, kingdom, iraq, state, nation, weapon, secur 
     FREX: palestinian, weapon, resolut, israel, destruct, kingdom, mass 
     Lift: 1441, palestinian, two-stat, chess, hama, jenin, quartet 
     Score: unit, un, iraq, weapon, saddam, kingdom, palestinian 
Topic 21 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: constitu, concern, awar, can, suffer, case, assur 
     FREX: mother, miner, mrs, compens, suffer, aircraft, mine 
     Lift: manston, tebbutt, tyrel, asbestosi, byron, ex-min, norburi 
     Score: constitu, compens, suffer, death, awar, tebbutt, safeti 
Topic 22 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: join, famili, tribut, pay, express, live, serv 
     FREX: condol, sympathi, regiment, tribut, sacrific, veteran, servicemen 
     Lift: aaron, chant, guardsman, gurung, khabra, mercian, spitfir 
     Score: tribut, condol, join, afghanistan, famili, express, sympathi 
Topic 23 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: make, issu, hon, import, gentleman, look, can 
     FREX: issu, proper, look, obvious, certain, understand, point 
     Lift: canvass, launder, quasi-judici, biodivers, offhand, obvious, certain 
     Score: issu, gentleman, import, hon, point, make, look 
Topic 24 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: invest, london, region, transport, develop, constitu, project 
     FREX: project, rail, scienc, infrastructur, transport, research, north 
     Lift: duall, electrifi, skelmersdal, wigton, dawlish, electrif, stoneheng 
     Score: invest, transport, region, rail, scienc, project, infrastructur 
Topic 25 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: local, communiti, council, author, support, polic, peopl 
     FREX: behaviour, antisoci, local, counti, club, footbal, author 
     Lift: blyth, changemak, asbo, graffiti, csos, darwen, under-16 
     Score: local, communiti, antisoci, behaviour, council, author, polic 
Topic 26 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: job, work, peopl, unemploy, economi, busi, help 
     FREX: unemploy, employ, growth, sector, long-term, apprenticeship, creat 
     Lift: skipton, entrepreneuri, sector-l, sandwich, back-to-work, entrepreneur, unemploy 
     Score: unemploy, job, economi, sector, employ, growth, busi 
Topic 27 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: say, let, said, want, labour, go, question 
     FREX: answer, question, let, got, shadow, listen, wrong 
     Lift: wriggl, airbrush, mccluskey, re-hir, pre-script, beveridg, bandwagon 
     Score: labour, answer, question, let, gentleman, said, say 
Topic 28 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: tax, pay, cut, budget, famili, rate, peopl 
     FREX: tax, vat, low, budget, top, revenu, incom 
     Lift: flatter, 45p, non-domicil, 107,000, 50p, clifton, millionair 
     Score: tax, cut, pay, incom, rate, famili, budget 
Topic 29 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: industri, compani, worker, british, manufactur, job, trade 
     FREX: manufactur, industri, product, plant, steel, worker, car 
     Lift: alstom, gum, jcb, peugeot, klesch, chew, dairi 
     Score: industri, manufactur, compani, worker, export, farmer, farm 
Topic 30 Top Words:
     Highest Prob: govern, can, mani, support, peopl, countri, take 
     FREX: mani, support, govern, unlik, give, come, take 
     Lift: philip, unlik, unbeliev, mani, though, leav, despit 
     Score: philip, govern, mani, unlik, support, can, peopl
  • Highest Prob is the raw \(\beta\) coefficients
  • Score is the term-score measure we defined above
  • FREX is a measure which combines word-topic frequency with word-topic exclusivity
  • Lift is a normalised version of the word-probabilities

Structural Topic Model Application

plot(stmOut, labeltype = "frex")

Structural Topic Model Application

cloud(stmOut, topic = 3)

Structural Topic Model Application

findThoughts(model = stmOut, 
             texts = as.character(pmq_corpus),
             topic = 3)

 Topic 3: 
     I suspect that many Members from all parties in this House will agree that mental health services have for too long been treated as a poor cousin a Cinderella service in the NHS and have been systematically underfunded for a long time. That is why I am delighted to say that the coalition Government have announced that we will be introducing new access and waiting time standards for mental health conditions such as have been in existence for physical health conditions for a long time. Over time, as reflected in the new NHS mandate, we must ensure that mental health is treated with equality of resources and esteem compared with any other part of the NHS.
    I am sure that the Prime Minister will join me in congratulating Cheltenham and Tewkesbury primary care trust on never having had a financial deficit and on living within its means. Can he therefore explain to the professionals, patients and people of Cheltenham why we are being rewarded with the closure of our 10-year-old purpose-built maternity ward, the closure of our rehabilitation hospital, cuts in health promotion, cuts in community nursing, cuts in health visiting, cuts in access to acute care and the non-implementation of new NICE-prescribed drugs such as Herceptin?
    I am sure that the Prime Minister will join me in congratulating Cheltenham and Tewkesbury primary care trust on never having had a financial deficit and on living within its means. Can he therefore explain to the professionals, patients and people of Cheltenham why we are being rewarded with the closure of our 10-year-old purpose-built maternity ward, the closure of our rehabilitation hospital, cuts in health promotion, cuts in community nursing, cuts in health visiting, cuts in access to acute care and the non-implementation of new NICE-prescribed drugs such as Herceptin?

Structural Topic Model Application

dim(stmOut$theta)
[1] 27885    30

Structural Topic Model Application

Do MPs from different parties speak about healthcare at different rates?

stm_effects <- estimateEffect(formula = c(3) ~ party.reduced,
                              stmobj = stmOut,
                              metadata = docvars(pmq_dfm))

plot.estimateEffect(stm_effects,
                    covariate = "party.reduced",
                    method = "pointestimate",
                    xlim = c(0.025, 0.045))

Structural Topic Model Application

Structural Topic Model Application

On which topics do Conservative and Labour MPs differ the most?

stm_effects <- estimateEffect(formula = c(1:30) ~ party.reduced,
                              stmobj = stmOut,
                              metadata = docvars(pmq_dfm))

Structural Topic Model Application – Content

library(stm)

## Estimate STM
stmOut2 <- stm(
            documents = pmq_dfm,
            content = ~party.reduced,
            K = 30,
            seed = 123
            )
               
save(stmOut2, file = "../data/scripts/stmOut2.Rdata")

Structural Topic Model Application – Content

plot(stmOut2, 
     topics = c(3),
     type = "perspectives",
     plabels = c("Conservative", "Labour"),
     main = topic_labels[3])

STM Application

Do liberal and conservative newspapers report on the economy in different ways?

Lucy Barnes and Tim Hicks (UCL) study the determinants of voters’ attitudes toward government deficits. They argue that individual attitudes are largely a function of media framing. They examine whether and how the Guardian (a left-leaning) and the Telegraph (a right-leaning) report on the economy.

Data and approach:

  • \(\approx 10,000\) newspaper articles

    • All articles using the word “deficit” from 2010-2015

  • STM model

  • \(K = 6\)

    • “We experimented with topic counts up to 20. Six was the value at which the topics’ content could be interpreted as substantively meaningful and distinct.”

  • Newspaper covariates for both prevalence and content

Validating Topic Models

Validating Topic Models

  • LDA, and topic models more generally, require the researcher to make several implementation decisions

  • In particular, we must select a value for \(K\), the number of topics

  • How can we select between different values of K? How can we tell how well a given topic model is performing?

Validating Topic Models – Quantitative Metrics

  • Predictive metric: Held-out likelihood

    • Ask which words the model believes will be in a given document and comparing this to the document’s actual word composition (i.e. calculate the held-out likelihood)

    • E.g. Splitting texts in half, train a topic model on one half, calculate the held-out likelihood for the other half

    • Problem: Prediction is not always important in exploratory or descriptive tasks. We may want models that capture other aspects of the data.

  • Interpretational metrics

    • Semantic coherence

      • Do the most common words from a topic also co-occur together frequently in the same documents?

    • Exclusivity

      • Do words with high probability in one topic have low probabilities in others?

    • Problem: The correlation between quantitative diagnostics such as these and human judgements of topic coherence is not always positive!

Quantitative Evaluation of STM

We can apply many of these metrics across a range of topic models using the searchK function in the stm package.

search_stm_out <- searchK(documents = pmq_dfm,
                          K = c(5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40),
                          N = 2000)

Semantic validity (Chang et al. 2009)

Word intrusion: Test if topics have semantic coherence by asking humans identify a spurious word inserted into a topic.

Topic \(w_1\) \(w_2\) \(w_3\) \(w_4\) \(w_5\) \(w_6\)
1 bank financ terror england fiscal market
2 europe union eu referendum vote school
3 act deliv nhs prison mr right
Topic \(w_1\) \(w_2\) \(w_3\) \(w_4\) \(w_5\) \(w_6\)
1 bank financ terror england fiscal market
2 europe union eu referendum vote school
3 act deliv nhs prison mr right

Assumption: When humans find it easy to locate the “intruding” word, the topics are more coherent.

Semantic validity (Chang et al. 2009)

Topic intrusion: Test if the association between topics and documents makes sense by asking humans to identify a topic that was not associated with a document.

Reforms to the banking system are an essential part of dealing with the crisis, and delivering lasting and sustainable growth to the economy. Without these changes, we will be weaker, we will be less well respected abroad, and we will be poorer.

Topic \(w_1\) \(w_2\) \(w_3\) \(w_4\) \(w_5\) \(w_6\)
1 bank financ regul england fiscal market
2 plan econom growth longterm deliv sector
3 school educ children teacher pupil class
Topic \(w_1\) \(w_2\) \(w_3\) \(w_4\) \(w_5\) \(w_6\)
1 bank financ regul england fiscal market
2 plan econom growth longterm deliv sector
3 school educ children teacher pupil class

Assumption: When humans find it easy to locate the “intruding” topic, the mappings are more sensible.

Semantic validity (Chang et al. 2009)

Conclusion:

“Topic models which perform better on held-out likelihood may infer less semantically meaningful topics.” (Chang et al. 2009.)

Validating Topic Models – Substantive approaches

  • Semantic validity

    • Does a topic contain coherent groups of words?
    • Does a topic identify a coherent groups of texts that are internally homogenous but distinctive from other topics?

  • Predictive validity

    • How well does variation in topic usage correspond to known events?

  • Construct validity

    • How well does our measure correlate with other measures?

Implication: All these approaches require careful human reading of texts and topics, and comparison with sensible metadata.

Conclusion

Summing Up

  • Topic models offer an approach to automatically inferring the substantive themes that exist in a corpus of texts

  • A topic is described as a probability distribution over words in the vocabulary

  • Documents are described as a mixture of corpus wide topics

  • Topic models require very little up-front effort, but require extensive interpretation and validation

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