Hierarchical topic integration through semi-supervised hierarchical topic modeling

Lots of document collections are well organized in hierarchical structure, and such structure can help users browse and understand these collections. Meanwhile, there are a large number of plain document collections loosely organized, and it is difficult for users to understand them effectively. In this paper we study how to automatically integrate latent topics in a plain collection with the topics in a hierarchical structured collection. We propose to use semi-supervised topic modeling to solve the problem in a principled way. The experiments show that the proposed method can generate both meaningful latent topics and expand high quality hierarchical topic structures.