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What Is
Topic
Modeling? A
Beginner's
Guide
Sorcha Content
·
Sheridan Marketer
November 16, 2022

Technology is making our lives easier.

Topic modeling is a tech advancement that uses Artificial Intelligence
to help businesses manage day-to-day operations, provide a smooth
customer experience, and improve different processes.
Every business has a number of moving parts. Take managing
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customer interactions, for example. Customer service teams

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deal with
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thousands of customers every day and may lose touch with essential
 business tasks while performing mundane and repetitive activities that
can easily be automated.
It’s not just customer service that struggles to keep up, but almost all
your teams—including finance, HR, accounting, production, and
marketing—waste their time on mundane tasks.
What if Artificial Intelligence (AI) could automate these mundane tasks
for you?
Topic modeling is one of the many ways in which AI can do just that.
Here's a deeper dive into this time-saving and tactical technique that
uses AI to automate processes and save your business time and money

Topic modeling defined

Topic modeling is a type of statistical modeling that uses unsupervised
Machine Learning to identify clusters or groups of similar words within
a body of text.
This text mining method uses semantic structures in text to understand
unstructured data without predefined tags or training data. Topic
modeling analyzes documents to identify common themes and provide
an adequate cluster. For example, a topic modeling algorithm could
identify whether incoming documents are contracts, invoices,
complaints, or more based on their contents.
Latent semantic analysis and latent Dirichlet analysis are two main
topic modeling methods that analyze large text files to categorize
topics, provide valuable insights, and support better decision-making.
Here’s a brief breakdown of both methods.

LSA: latent semantic analysis

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 Latent semantic analysis is a statistical technique for extracting and
representing the main ideas in a body of text. LSA is based on the
principle that words that are close in meaning tend to be used together
in context.
For example, LSA allows you to create user profiles to provide a more
personalized user experience. The organization can use demographic
data, purchase history, and previous interactions and behavior to
group similar users and establish a set of user profiles.
This is a one-time process, which can then be automated using
Machine Learning. How?
LSA links words semantically by context and word frequency—how
often a word occurs in a document. In this case, customers with similar
attributes—such as behavior and interaction type—will be grouped
under one topic (category). Using unsupervised machine learning, LSA
automatically creates separate topics based on previous inputs and
outputs.
LSA assumes all similar documents to share the same patterns when
their word frequency and order are consistent, which helps analyze not
just one but a collection of documents. It’s a part of natural language
processing, closely related to learning and understanding human
language and judgment, and has many applications, including
document and image classification.

LDA: latent Dirichlet analysis

Latent Dirichlet analysis is one of the most popular topic modeling
methods. It uncovers the hidden structure in a set of observations by
looking at the relationships between words in a document and
grouping them into topics.
It considers documents as a mixture of topics and topics as a mixture of
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words. When analyzing multiple documents, it treats them as having

similar topics with different distributions.
 For example, Document A may have "10% Topic Y" and "90% Topic Z",
while Document B has "40% Topic Y" and "60% Topic Z".
The LDA model further breaks down topics into words, assuming that
multiple topics may have common words. Consider the following three
topics.
Biology: This document may contain words like anatomy,
dissection, and genomes
Chemistry: This document may contain words such as solutions,
chemicals, and alloys
Biology and chemistry may also share words like molecular weight and
carbon cycle, which are considered similar “topics” in LDA. With LDA,
you can analyze matching topics in these two documents and create
specific groups for each topic. This way, you create a document term
matrix, an interconnected network of topics, and analyze multiple
documents to classify their contents, text, image, and more.

How does a topic model work?

Despite the many mechanics and algorithmic features in topic
modeling, topic models work pretty simply. They deduce words,
grouping similar word patterns into topics to create topic clusters.
Suppose you’re a retail company selling fashion clothing. Your online
store has different categories and product images and descriptions
under each category. If you want to show customers similar products or
just group products into their related categories, it's impractical to tie
each product with its category manually.
To make things easier, you can use a topic modeling algorithm and
automatically tag and group items into different categories. The topic
model will analyze huge amounts of unstructured data to find patterns
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based on word frequency, order, distance, and meaning and group
 various items into relevant categories without predefined training—et
voilà!

What is the difference between topic

modeling and clustering?
Topic modeling is a statistical technique for discovering latent topics in
a collection of documents. Clustering is a Machine Learning method for
grouping together similar data points. Both methods group documents,
but they differ in how they do it.
Clustering algorithms group together similar items, while topic
modeling algorithms identify relationships between items. Topic
modeling uses a statistical approach to find hidden topics in a
collection of documents.
Clustering is typically used to group items together so that they can be
analyzed as a whole.
Topic modeling finds relationships between items and understands a
dataset's hidden structure. Additionally, topic modeling doesn’t require
manual labeling of the data points, whereas clustering requires
manual labeling of the data points.

Topic modeling vs. topic classification

Both topic modeling and topic classification are unsupervised learning
methods. This means that they do not require labeled data to learn.
They can both be used to discover hidden patterns in data—they just do
it differently.

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 Topic Modeling vs Topic Classfication

Topic modeling vs. text classification

Whereas topic modeling involves finding topics in a collection of
documents, text classification leverages text classifiers to assign a label
to a document based on its content.
Text classification is more specific and categorizes documents into
predefined categories.
Here are a few key differences between topic modeling and text
classification:

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 Topic Modeling vs Text Classification

Although topic modeling and text classification work differently, they

can work together to get the best possible AI predictions.
Levity combines techniques from both supervised and semi-supervised
learning to create an AI automation tool that works on unstructured
data, including images, documents, and text and allows you to train AI
models tailored to your use case.

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 Upload your training data to Levity, and start training your AI model in a few simple
steps.

Here's a closer look at topic modeling and text classification

applications.

Topic modeling applications

Topic modeling can be used for a variety of tasks. Here are some of its
common applications.

Document classification
Topic modeling is an unsupervised Machine Learning technique that
uses Natural Language Processing to understand the context and label
new documents. It automatically tags each document with the topic it
most closely resembles.
For example, latent Dirichlet allocation is commonly used to classify
scholarly articles by their topics and has also helped classify the New
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York Times articles.
 Tagging customer support tickets
You can also use topic modeling to automatically tag customer support
tickets. Start by training a topic model with a labeled dataset of
customer support tickets. The topics learned can then be used to flag
new tickets.
The Machine Learning technique mines data from support issues your
customers have had over the years, and idenitifies the main issues that
keep popping up.
This can help support agents quickly spot issues and their frequency to
provide the best customer support possible route tickets to the
appropriate team, and customers can find relevant information faster.

Detecting urgency support tickets

Topic modeling can easily detect urgency in customer support tickets.
Prioritizing requests and inquiries can be a real chore for customer
service agents.
Using Natural Language Processing techniques and Machine Learning
models, topic modeling can extract topics from tickets, group them,
identify the semantic relationship between them, classify tickets into
different categories, and flag tickets that need the most attention.

Analyzing customer feedback

Many companies typically don’t focus on analyzing customer feedback
due to a lack of understanding of the manual work involved. With topic
models, you can easily evaluate customer feedback and even save
costs.
Topic models assess customer feedback and create labels based on
what customers say. They’re easy to use, fast, and efficient.
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Text classification applications

 Text classification uses supervised machine learning algorithms to
classify text. Let's look at some of its uses.

Analyze survey results

Text classification can help analyze survey results by training a text
classifier on a labeled dataset to categorize new results.
In order to ensure business growth, you need to know what your
customers and employees think of you. Gathering their feedback
manually is tedious, and this is where surveys come in.
Popular surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS) are critical to your
bottom line, but manually analyzing text from surveys is time-
consuming. Automating the process can save you from spending hours
on a task and reduce the time-to-value.
In order to simplify the process, Levity automatically segments
customer feedback by sentiment into different categories such as
promoters, detractors, and supporters. It also auto-detects positive,
negative, and neutral responses to uncover underlying patterns and
understand the intent and subject matter of the feedback.
Levity's sentiment analysis capabilities allow you to analyze customer
feedback and automatically route feedback to relevant teams or
leaders within your organization, who can take appropriate action to
improve the employee or customer experience.

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 Analyze customer feedback with Levity

Automatic ticket routing

Text classification comes in handy when automatically routing tickets to
an appropriate customer service agent. To manually route tickets, you
need a human support agent. This only wastes your support team’s
time as most tickets are repetitive.
Machine learning algorithms are specifically supervised and trained to
automate the process and reduce errors. Automatic ticket tagging and
routing can go a long way in making the support process more
seamless and improving the customer experience with quick resolution.
When it comes to automatic ticket routing, Levity is a best-in-class
solution that supports your customer service with efficient automation.
Automate categorizing tickets and free your agents to focus more on
important customers, boosting employee morale, productivity, and
response time.
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Categorize support tickets with Levity

Sentiment analysis
Understanding the sentiment behind a request or feedback and
classifying it as positive, negative, or neutral is critical in a customer-
centric landscape. It helps you ensure your customer’s needs are met
both proactively and preemptively.
Knowing the sentiment of a message can help you deal with
dissatisfied or angry customers and provide them with a quick and
correct solution.
Levity gives you the power to proactively listen to and understand your
customers to identify issues. The AI software extracts the tone of any
message even before opening or reading it and categorizes messages
based on these tones.

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 Track sentiment in Google Sheets

Categorize email
Managing email is a major pain point for most professionals.
It's difficult to manually categorize and tag emails based on content,
especially when working with many emails in one inbox. Deciding what
to delete, keep, and prioritize can take a lot of time. You may even miss
important emails and end up creating gaps in communication.
AI-powered text classification can be of great help here. Email
classification can help you classify emails into different categories such
as personal, customer, internal, and external.
Levity's AI engine simplifies email categorization for different
mailboxes, inducing Gmail, Outlook, and more.
Once the AI model has categorized your emails, Levity enables you to
automate the next steps—whether that be to forward emails to a
specific team member or move them to a specific folder.
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 Categorize emails with Levity

Social listening
With everything happening online, it’s essential that businesses keep
track of brand mentions and how their brand is being projected across
the internet. Social listening is critical to maintaining a positive brand
image and addressing customer concerns.
That being said, it isn’t exactly easy to manually record everywhere
you’re mentioned. Add social media to the mix, and the process
becomes even more complex.
Sounds hectic, right?
If you do it manually, it is. That’s why you need to automate the
process. Listen to your existing and potential customers and tap into
different areas to grow your brand with text classification.
Levity enables you to listen out for certain mentions across the web,
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from complaints to competitors, to give you a better idea of what your

customers are saying about your brand.
 Levity enables you to pull brand mentions and reviews from a wide
variety of sources, run them through an AI text classification model,
and automate the next steps. For example, negative mentions could be
sent to the customer success team.

Track keyword engagement with Levity

How to do topic classification with

Levity
Topic classification—categorizing documents into predefined topics—
can seem daunting at first, but with the right tool, you can do it at the
click of a button. Levity is an automated no-code AI solution that easily
and accurately divides topics into different categories in simple steps.

Gather data
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To use Levity for topic classification, you first need a labeled dataset of
documents. The dataset should be in a text or .CSV file, where each line
 is a document. The documents should be labeled with their categories,
such as ‘health’ or ‘finance’.

Train a topic model

Once you have a labeled dataset, you need to train your AI block on it.
Levity's AI engine is intuitive and helps train AI blocks faster based on
similar inputs across the system.
Your AI block, once trained, prompts you to the next step: improving the
performance score. In this case, the AI Block overview will show your
model’s performance score and the actions you need to take to
improve it. For example, create a certain number of labels or add more
data points to enhance the score.
After completing these actions, you can retrain the AI block to get an
optimal score and move forward.

Test and Play in the Levity app

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Label new documents

 The AI block is now ready to label new documents. Once trained and
tested, it knows exactly where to go and what to do with all future
documents.

AI solutions help you work better

Levity’s AI learns your preferences, habits, and patterns to recommend
the most productive tasks for you each day. It also collects data on your
performance to give you detailed feedback so you can improve as you
go.
The no-code AI solution gives businesses big and small the opportunity
to automate mundane tasks and focus on other—more important—
tasks.

Begin your
journey with AI
automation
Simple but powerful AI for documents,
images, and text, that automates your
daily repetitive tasks. Connect your
workflows in minutes, without a single
line of code.

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 Now that you're here
Levity is a tool that allows you to train AI models on images, documents, and text data.
You can rebuild manual workflows and connect everything to your existing systems
without writing a single line of code.‍If you liked this blog post, you'll love Levity.

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