TopicMerge: A Divide and Conquer Approach to Topic Modeling
Matthew Raffel, Lizhong Chen, Sai Munikoti, Sameera Horawalavithana
Abstract
Recent advancements in topic modeling have split into two main paths: efficient embedding-based methods that offer scalability but are often outperformed on standard clustering metrics, and Large Language Model (LLM) approaches that achieve state-of-the-art clustering performance but at the cost of prohibitive computational expense and poor scalability. This paper introduces TopicMerge, a novel multi-stage pipeline that bridges these approaches to achieve both state-of-the-art clustering performance and computational efficiency. TopicMerge first employs an efficient clustering pipeline to deliberately over-segment a document corpus into a large set of fine-grained, semantically pure micro-clusters, which are then given initial semantic labels. It then introduces a novel, iterative merging algorithm where an LLM, guided by local neighborhood context, arbitrates on consolidating candidate pairs. These approved merges are then selectively executed and semantically relabeled by the LLM, hierarchically building broader, more coherent topics. Extensive experiments on the Bills and Wiki datasets show that TopicMerge achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance while reducing required LLM calls by over 92% compared to document-level methods, offering a practical and scalable solution.