Supervised Topic Classification for Modeling a Hierarchical Conference Structure

In this paper we investigate the problem of supervised latent modeling for extracting topic hierarchies from data. The supervised part is given in the form of expert information over document-topic correspondence. To exploit the expert information we use a regularization term that penalizes the difference between a predicted and an expert-given model. We hence add the regularization term to the log-likelihood function and use a stochastic EM based algorithm for parameter estimation. The proposed method is used to construct a topic hierarchy over the proceedings of the European Conference on Operational Research and helps to automatize the abstract submission system.