Increasing Interpretation of Web Topic Detection via Prototype Learning From Sparse Poisson Deconvolution

Organizing webpages into interesting topics is one of the key steps to understand the trends from multimodal Web data. The sparse, noisy, and less-constrained user-generated content results in inefficient feature representations. These descriptors unavoidably cause that a detected topic still contains a certain number of the false detected webpages, which further make a topic be less coherent, less interpretable, and less useful. In this paper, we address this problem from a viewpoint interpreting a topic by its prototypes, and present a two-step approach to achieve this goal. Following the detection-by-ranking approach, a sparse Poisson deconvolution is proposed to learn the intratopic similarities between webpages. To find the prototypes, leveraging the intratopic similarities, top-k diverse yet representative prototype webpages are identified from a submodularity function. Experimental results not only show the improved accuracies for the Web topic detection task, but also increase the interpretation of a topic by its prototypes on two public datasets.