Topic Modeling on Document Networks With Dirichlet Optimal Transport Barycenter

Text documents are often interconnected in a network structure, e.g., academic papers via citations, Web pages via hyperlinks. On the one hand, though Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising ability to derive effective embeddings for such networked documents, they do not assume a latent topic structure and result in uninterpretable embeddings. On the other hand, topic models can infer semantically interpretable topic distributions for documents by associating each topic with a group of understandable key words. However, most topic models mainly focus on plain text within documents and fail to leverage network structure across documents. Network connectivity reveals topic similarity between linked documents, and modeling it could uncover meaningful semantics. Motivated by above two challenges, in this paper, we propose a GNN-based neural topic model that both captures network connectivity and derives semantically interpretable topic distributions for networked documents. For network modeling, we build the model based on the theory of Optimal Transport Barycenter, which captures network structure by allowing the topic distribution of a document to generate the content of its linked neighbors. For semantic interpretability, we extend optimal transport by incorporating semantically related words in the embedding space. Since Dirichlet prior in Latent Dirichlet Allocation successfully improves topic quality, we also analyze Dirichlet as an optimal transport prior distribution to improve topic interpretability. We design rejection sampling to simulate Dirichlet distribution. Extensive experiments on document classification, clustering, link prediction, and topic analysis verify the effectiveness of our model.