Scalable Topical Phrase Mining from Text Corpora

While most topic modeling algorithms model text corpora with unigrams, human interpretation often relies on inher-ent grouping of terms into phrases. As such, we consider the problem of discovering topical phrases of mixed lengths. Existing work either performs post processing to the results of unigram-based topic models, or utilizes complex n-gram-discovery topic models. These methods generally produce low-quality topical phrases or suffer from poor scalability on even moderately-sized datasets. We propose a different ap-proach that is both computationally efficient and effective. Our solution combines a novel phrase mining framework to segment a document into single and multi-word phrases, and a new topic model that operates on the induced docu-ment partition. Our approach discovers high quality topical phrases with negligible extra cost to the bag-of-words topic model in a variety of datasets including research publication titles, abstracts, reviews, and news articles. 1