CobwebTM: Probabilistic Concept Formation for Lifelong and Hierarchical Topic Modeling
Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent semantic structure in text corpora with minimal supervision. Neural approaches achieve strong performance but require extensive tuning and struggle with lifelong learning due to catastrophic forgetting and fixed capacity, while classical probabilistic models lack flexibility and adaptability to streaming data. We introduce CobwebTM, a low-parameter lifelong hierarchical topic model based on incremental probabilistic concept formation. By adapting the Cobweb algorithm to continuous document embeddings, CobwebTM constructs semantic hierarchies online, enabling unsupervised topic discovery, dynamic topic creation, and hierarchical organization without p...
| Authors | Karthik Singaravadivelan, Anant Gupta, Zekun Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.