Topic Identification in Dynamical Text by Complexity Pursuit

  • Authors:

  • Ella Bingham;Ata Kabán;Mark Girolami

  • Affiliations:

  • Neural Networks Research Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 5400, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland;Neural Networks Research Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 5400, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland;Neural Networks Research Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 5400, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Neural Processing Letters
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The problem of analysing dynamically evolving textual data has arisen within the last few years. An example of such data is the discussion appearin g in Internet chat lines. In this Letter a recently introduced source separation method, termed as complexity pursuit, is applied to the problem of finding topics in dynamical text and is compared against several blind separation algorithms for the problem considered. Complexity pursuit is a generalisation of projection pursuit to time series and it is able to use both higher-order statistical measures and temporal dependency information in separating the topics. Experimental results on chat line and newsgroup data demonstrate that the minimum complexity time series indeed do correspond to meaningful topics inherent in the dynamical text data, and also suggest the applicability of the method to query-based retrieval from a temporally changing text stream.