A Fast and Effective Framework for Lifelong Topic Model with Self-learning Knowledge

To discover semantically coherent topics from topic models, knowledge-based topic models have been proposed to incorporate prior knowledge into topic models. Moreover, some researchers propose lifelong topic models (LTM) to mine prior knowledge from topics generated from multi-domain corpus without human intervene. LTM incorporates the learned knowledge from multi-domain corpus into topic models by introducing the Generalized Polya Urn (GPU) model into Gibbs sampling. However, GPU model is nonexchangeable so that topic inference for LTM is computationally expensive. Meanwhile, variational inference is an alternative approach to Gibbs sampling and tend to be faster than Gibbs sampling. Moreover, variational inference can also be flexible for inferring topic models with knowledge, i.e., regularized topic model. In this paper, we propose a fast and effective framework for lifelong topic model, called Regularized Lifelong Topic Model with Self-learning Knowledge (RLTM-SK), with lexical knowledge automatically learnt from the previous topic extraction, then design a variational inference method to estimate the posterior distributions of hidden variables for RLTM-SK. We compare our method with 5 state-of-the-art baselines on a dataset of product reviews from 50 domains. Results show that the performance of our method is comparable to LTM and other knowledge-based topic models. Moreover, our model is consistently faster than the best baseline method, LTM.