Hall emnlp2008

Citation

• Title : Studying the History of Ideas Using Topic Models
• Authors : D. Hall, D. Jurafsky, and C. D. Manning
• Venue : EMNLP 2008

Summary

This paper uses topic models to study the development of ideas over time for papers in computational linguistics conferences (ACL, COOLING, EMNLP, etc.)

Dataset

ACL Anthology (~12,500 papers)

Model

Instead of using dynamic topic models, they used static topics models (vanilla LDA) with post hoc analysis to calculate observed probability of topics in the current year, computed as follows:
${\hat {p}}(z|y)=\sum _{d:t_{d}=y}{\hat {p}}(z|d){\hat {p}}(d|y)$

Experiments

• Ran 100 topics LDA, took relevant 36 topics.
• Seeded words for 10 more topics to improve coverage.
• Used these 36+10 topics as priors for new 100-topics run.
• Picked 43 topics and manually labeled them.

Results

These is only a subset of their results. There are more in the paper.

• Trending topics in the CL community
  

• Declining topics in the CL community
  

• NLP applications

They investigated whether CL is becoming more applied over time.
They explored six applicatons : Machine Translation, Spelling Correction, Dialogue Systems, Call Routing, Speech Recognition, and Biomedical