通过图结构追踪话题生命周期,精准识别分裂与合并。
BERTilda: Explainable Topic Lifecycle Tracking with Split/Merge Detection via Similarity-and-Flow Temporal Graphs

- 基于嵌入模型分窗提取话题,用语义相似性与跨窗文档流向构建时序图。
- 在政治文本数据上实现87%标签一致率,对消失话题检测优于现有方法。
- 适合需要解释话题演化过程的研究者,如舆情分析与历史事件追踪。
纵向文本流中存在话题的诞生与消亡,还包含主题分裂为子话题或合并为更广泛叙事的离散结构重组。多数动态主题模型强调平滑演变,而快照式主题模型(每段时间窗口独立建模)缺乏时间对应关系。本文提出BERTilda,一种可解释框架:先在各窗口独立使用基于嵌入的主题模型发现话题,再构建跨相邻窗口的话题时序图。链接由两个互补信号支持:(i) 话题表示间的语义相似性;(ii) 双向覆盖信号,通过跨窗口推文-话题归属估计话题的流出(去向)与流入(来源)。基于图规则标注连续、分裂、合并、消失及模糊转换。在包括美国国会推文和历史演讲在内的政治语料上评估,报告了话题质量与时序稳定性诊断,并在三名独立标注者标注的黄金标准子集上验证生命周期标签。在该子集上,BERTilda达到最高87%多数一致率,宏平均一致性超越对比方法,尤其在消失话题检测方面显著优于仅依赖相似性或单向基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Longitudinal text streams exhibit topic birth and death, but also discrete structural reorganizations in which themes split into subtopics or merge into broader narratives. Many dynamic topic models emphasize smooth drift, while snapshot topic models (fit independently per time window) leave temporal correspondence underspecified. We present BERTilda, an explainable framework that discovers topics independently in each window (using an embedding-based topic model) and then constructs a temporal topic graph linking topics across adjacent windows. Links are supported by two complementary signals: (i) semantic similarity between topic representations and (ii) a bidirectional coverage signal that estimates document outflow (where a topic goes) and inflow (where a topic comes from) via cross-window tweet-to-topic attribution. Graph-based rules label continuations, splits, merges, disappearances, and unclear transitions. We evaluate BERTilda on political corpora, including U.S. congressional tweets and historical speech datasets, report topic-quality and temporal-stability diagnostics, and validate lifecycle labels on a gold-standard subset annotated by three independent annotators. On the annotated subset, BERTilda reaches majority agreement rates up to 87% and attains the highest macro-average agreement across the compared methods, with particularly strong disappearance detection relative to similarity-only and forward-only baselines.
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