A Survey of Multi-Label Topic Models

Abstract

Every day, an enormous amount of text data is produced. Sources of text data include news, social media, emails, text messages, medical reports, scientific publications and fiction. To keep track of this data, there are categories, key words, tags or labels that are assigned to each text. Automatically predicting such labels is the task of multi-label text classification. Often however, we are interested in more than just the pure classification: rather, we would like to understand which parts of a text belong to the label, which words are important for the label or which labels occur together. Because of this, topic models may be used for multi-label classification as an interpretable model that is flexible and easily extensible. This survey demonstrates the manifold possibilities and flexibility of the topic model framework for the complex setting of multi-label text classification by categorizing different variants of models.