{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/author-clustering-and-topic-estimation-for","title":"Author Clustering and Topic Estimation for Short Texts","arxiv_id":"2106.09533","date":"2021-06-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Graham Tierney","Christopher Bail","Alexander Volfovsky"],"abstract":"Analysis of short text, such as social media posts, is extremely difficult because of their inherent brevity. In addition to classifying topics of such posts, a common downstream task is grouping the authors of these documents for subsequent analyses. We propose a novel model that expands on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation by modeling strong dependence among the words in the same document, with user-level topic distributions. We also simultaneously cluster users, removing the need for post-hoc cluster estimation and improving topic estimation by shrinking noisy user-level topic distributions towards typical values. Our method performs as well as -- or better -- than traditional approaches, and we demonstrate its usefulness on a dataset of tweets from United States Senators, recovering both meaningful topics and clusters that reflect partisan ideology. We also develop a novel measure of echo chambers among these politicians by characterizing insularity of topics discussed by groups of Senators and provide uncertainty quantification.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09533v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.09533v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"author-clustering-and-topic-estimation-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/g-tierney/stLDA-C_public","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"},{"task_slug":"uncertainty-quantification","task_name":"Uncertainty Quantification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}