Accounting for Temporal Dynamics in Document Streams

Textual information, such as news articles, social media, and online forum discussions, often comes in a form of sequential text streams. Events happening in the real world trigger a set of articles talking about them or related events over a period of time. In the meanwhile, even one event is fading out, another related event could raise public attention. Hence, it is important to leverage the information about how topics influence each other over time to obtain a better understanding and modeling of document streams. In this paper, we explicitly model mutual influence among topics over time, with the purpose to better understand how events emerge, fade and inherit. We propose a temporal point process model, referred to as Correlated Temporal Topic Model (CoTT), to capture the temporal dynamics in a latent topic space. Our model allows for efficient online inference, scaling to continuous time document streams. Extensive experiments on real-world data reveal the effectiveness of our model in recovering meaningful temporal dependency structure among topics and documents.