Activating topic models from a cognitive perspective

Topic modeling is a popular text mining technique for extracting latent semantics from text. It can be widely applied in intelligence analyzing, anti-Terrorist, and various other security related tasks. Most existing topic models only focus exclusively on the text literally, and disregard rich contextual, cultural, and language background, hindering the understanding and discovering of the key clues implied in the text. Based on cognitive psychology theories, we justify the classical psychological activation theory named Adaptive Control of Thought from the perspective of information theory. Then, we propose a fast and loosely-coupled activation presentation of text for topic models. Our method mimics the aspect of human cognitive procedure when facing the activation of new concepts based on word correlations and word frequencies. Experimental results on multiple tasks show that our activation presentation models can significantly improve the performance of the topic models with linear time consumption.