One of the most useful ways to understand text is through topics. The process of learning, recognizing, and extracting these topics is called topic modeling. Understanding broad topics in text has several applications. It can be used in the legal industry to surface themes from contracts. (Rather than manually reviewing mountains of contracts for certain provisions, through unsupervised learning, themes or topics can surface). Furthermore, it can be used in the retail industry to identify broad trends in social media conversations. These broad trends can then be used for product innovation—to introduce new merchandise into online and physical stores, to inform others of product assortment, and so on.
In this chapter, we are going to learn how to synthesize topics from long-form text (text that's longer than 140 characters). We...
