Topic Segmentation with a Structured Topic Model

Lan Du and Wray Buntine

We present a new hierarchical Bayesian model for unsupervised topic segmentation. This new model integrates a point-wise boundary sampling algorithm used in Bayesian segmentation into a structured topic model that can capture a simple hierarchical topic structure latent in documents. We develop an MCMC inference algorithm to split/merge segment(s). Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous unsupervised segmentation methods using only lexical information on Choi's datasets and two meeting transcripts and has performance comparable to those previous methods on two written datasets.