Automatic Topic Title Assignment with Word Embedding

Abstract

In this paper, we propose TAWE (title assignment with word embedding), a new method to automatically assign titles to topics inferred from sets of documents. This method combines the results obtained from the topic modeling performed with, e.g., latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) or other suitable methods and the word embedding representation of words in a vector space. This representation preserves the meaning of the words while allowing to find the most suitable word that represents the topic. The procedure is twofold: first, a cleaned text is used to build the LDA model to infer a desirable number of latent topics; second, a reasonable number of words and their weights are extracted from each topic and represented in n-dimensional space using word embedding. Based on the selected weighted words, a centroid is computed, and the closest word is chosen as the title of the topic. To test the method, we used a collection of tweets about climate change downloaded from some of the main newspapers accounts on Twitter. Results showed that TAWE is a suitable method for automatically assigning a topic title.