Comparing PSO-based clustering over contextual vector embeddings to modern topic modeling

Efficient topic modeling is needed to support applications that aim at identifying main themes from a collection of documents. In the present paper, a reduced vector embedding representation and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are combined to develop a topic modeling strategy that is able to identify representative themes from a large collection of documents. Documents are encoded using a reduced, contextual vector embedding from a general-purpose pre-trained language model (sBERT). A modified PSO algorithm (pPSO) that tracks particle fitness on a dimension-by-dimension basis is then applied to these embeddings to create clusters of related documents. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on two datasets. The first dataset consists of posts from the online health forum r/Cancer and the second dataset is a standard benchmark for topic modeling which consists of a collection of messages posted to 20 different news groups. When compared to the state-of-the-art generative document models (i.e., ETM and NVDM), pPSO is able to produce interpretable clusters. The results indicate that pPSO is able to capture both common topics as well as emergent topics. Moreover, the topic coherence of pPSO is comparable to that of ETM and its topic diversity is comparable to NVDM. The assignment parity of pPSO on a document completion task exceeded 90% for the 20NewsGroups dataset. This rate drops to approximately 30% when pPSO is applied to the same Skip-Gram embedding derived from a limited, corpus-specific vocabulary which is used by ETM and NVDM. •Comparing evolutionary (pPSO) to generative topic modeling (ETM and NVDM).•Pre-trained language embeddings are efficient in encoding text for evolutionary topic models.•pPSO generates interpretable topics for health forum and news groups posts.•The methodology does not require a corpus-specific embedding or vocabulary.