Are Semantically Coherent Topic Models Useful for Ad Hoc Information Retrieval?
Résumé
The current topic modeling approaches for
Information Retrieval do not allow to explicitly
model query-oriented latent topics.
More, the semantic coherence of the
topics has never been considered in this
field. We propose a model-based feedback
approach that learns Latent Dirichlet Allocation
topic models on the top-ranked
pseudo-relevant feedback, and we measure
the semantic coherence of those topics.
We perform a first experimental evaluation
using two major TREC test collections.
Results show that retrieval performances
tend to be better when using topics
with higher semantic coherence.