sDTM: A Supervised Bayesian Deep Topic Model for Text Analytics

Abstract

This study proposes a novel supervised deep topic modeling approach for effective text analysis. This approach leverages the auxiliary data associated with text, such as ratings in consumer reviews or categories of posts in online forums, to enhance the discovery of latent topics in text. The proposed approach can effectively improve topic modeling performance in several ways. First, the learned latent topics are more meaningful and distinguishable, which helps text data exploration. Second, the latent topics discovered by the novel supervised deep topic model are more accurate, which improves the performance of downstream econometrics and predictive analytics that utilize latent topics as inputs. Given the prevalence of auxiliary data in real-world text analysis tasks and the wide adoption of topic modeling in business research and practice, the study offers an effective solution for extracting insights from text data.