Is Neural Topic Modelling Better than Clustering? An Empirical Study on Clustering with Contextual Embeddings for Topics

NAACL 2022 · Zihan Zhang, Meng Fang, Ling Chen, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad ·

Recent work incorporates pre-trained word embeddings such as BERT embeddings into Neural Topic Models (NTMs), generating highly coherent topics. However, with high-quality contextualized document representations, do we really need sophisticated neural models to obtain coherent and interpretable topics? In this paper, we conduct thorough experiments showing that directly clustering high-quality sentence embeddings with an appropriate word selecting method can generate more coherent and diverse topics than NTMs, achieving also higher efficiency and simplicity.