Exploring Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Dirichlet Priors for Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) has gained much attention from researchers and is increasingly being applied to uncover underlying semantic structures from a variety of corpora. However, nearly all researchers use symmetrical Dirichlet priors, often unaware of the underlying practical implications that they bear. This research is the first to explore symmetrical and asymmetrical Dirichlet priors on topic coherence and human topic ranking when uncovering latent semantic structures from scientific research articles. More specifically, we examine the practical effects of several classes of Dirichlet priors on 2000 LDA models created from abstract and full-text research articles. Our results show that symmetrical or asymmetrical priors on the document–topic distribution or the topic–word distribution for full-text data have little effect on topic coherence scores and human topic ranking. In contrast, asymmetrical priors on the document–topic distribution for abstract data show a significant increase in topic coherence scores and improved human topic ranking compared to a symmetrical prior. Symmetrical or asymmetrical priors on the topic–word distribution show no real benefits for both abstract and full-text data.