Tandem Anchoring: a Multiword Anchor Approach for Interactive Topic Modeling
Interactive topic models are powerful tools for those seeking to understand large collections of text. However, existing sampling-based interactive topic modeling approaches scale poorly to large data sets. Anchor methods, which use a single word to uniquely identify a topic, offer the speed needed for interactive work but lack both a mechanism to inject prior knowledge and lack the intuitive semantics needed for user-facing applications. We propose combinations of words as anchors, going beyond existing single word anchor algorithms{---}an approach we call {``}Tandem Anchors{''}. We begin with a synthetic investigation of this approach then apply the approach to interactive topic modeling in a user study and compare it to interactive and non-interactive approaches. Tandem anchors are faster and more intuitive than existing interactive approaches.
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