Discriminative Neural Topic Models

Abstract: We propose a neural network based approach for learning topics from text and image datasets. The model makes no assumptions about the conditional distribution of the observed features given the latent topics. This allows us to perform topic modelling efficiently using sentences of documents and patches of images as observed features, rather than limiting ourselves to words. Moreover, the proposed approach is online, and hence can be used for streaming data. Furthermore, since the approach utilizes neural networks, it can be implemented on GPU with ease, and hence it is very scalable.