TopiCLEAR: Adaptive embedding clustering for interpretable topic discovery from short texts

Abstract:Topic discovery is a fundamental technique for text mining that identifies abstract topics within large document collections. A recent approach to topic discovery is to cluster document or sentence embeddings, typically obtained from pre-trained language models, and represent each cluster as a topic. Despite their strong empirical performance, the design principles linking the geometry of embedding spaces to human-interpretable topic organization remain unclear. Clarifying the relationship between these geometric structures and topic interpretability is therefore a key challenge in topic discovery. In this study, we propose TopiCLEAR (Topic discovery by CLustering Embeddings with Adaptive dimensionality Reduction), a simple framework that integrates document embeddings with iterative clustering based on adaptive dimensionality reduction. TopiCLEAR is guided by the hypothesis that human-interpretable topics correspond to low-dimensional geometric structures in embedding spaces and leverages adaptive dimensionality reduction to identify them. We evaluate topic quality using a document-level approach that combines quantitative evaluation based on human-labeled data with qualitative assessment in the absence of ground-truth labels. Experiments on four benchmark datasets, covering both formal and informal texts, show that TopiCLEAR consistently achieves strong agreement with human annotations, particularly for short and informal texts. Furthermore, a case study on Twitter data demonstrates that TopiCLEAR produces more interpretable topics than Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), recovering both human-annotated topic structure and coherent sub-topic structure. These results highlight the effectiveness of clustering documents in a low-dimensional topic space for topic discovery.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2512.06694 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2512.06694v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.06694 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.133996 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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