Word Embedding Models Are the New Topic Models
By Jonathan Fitzgerald, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Northeastern University I remember the first time I trained a topic model. It was in a course called Humanities Data Analysis, taught by Ben Schmidt. He provided us a corpus of the Federalist Papers and some code that he adapted from David Mimno, contributor to the original MALLET package and author of the R implementation of MALLET. After the initial confusion–“topics” aren’t topics in the traditional sense, after all–it felt like magic. The computer…