Evaluating Negative Sampling Approaches for Neural Topic Models

Negative sampling has emerged as an effective technique that enables deep learning models to learn better representations by introducing the paradigm of “learn-to-compare.” The goal of this approach is to add robustness to deep learning models to learn better representation by comparing the positive samples against the negative ones. Despite its numerous demonstrations in various areas of computer vision and natural language processing, a comprehensive study of the effect of negative sampling in an unsupervised domain such as topic modeling has not been well explored. In this article, we present a comprehensive analysis of the impact of different negative sampling strategies on neural topic models. We compare the performance of several popular neural topic models by incorporating a negative sampling technique in the decoder of variational autoencoder-based neural topic models. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate that integrating negative sampling into topic models results in significant enhancements across multiple aspects, including improved topic coherence, richer topic diversity, and more accurate document classification. Manual evaluations also indicate that the inclusion of negative sampling into neural topic models enhances the quality of the generated topics. These findings highlight the potential of negative sampling as a valuable tool for advancing the effectiveness of neural topic models.