  This paper presents an algorithmic family of dynamic topic models called
Aligned Neural Topic Models (ANTM), which combine novel data mining algorithms
to provide a modular framework for discovering evolving topics. ANTM maintains
the temporal continuity of evolving topics by extracting time-aware features
from documents using advanced pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) and
employing an overlapping sliding window algorithm for sequential document
clustering. This overlapping sliding window algorithm identifies a different
number of topics within each time frame and aligns semantically similar
document clusters across time periods. This process captures emerging and
fading trends across different periods and allows for a more interpretable
representation of evolving topics. Experiments on four distinct datasets show
that ANTM outperforms probabilistic dynamic topic models in terms of topic
coherence and diversity metrics. Moreover, it improves the scalability and
flexibility of dynamic topic models by being accessible and adaptable to
different types of algorithms. Additionally, a Python package is developed for
researchers and scientists who wish to study the trends and evolving patterns
of topics in large-scale textual data.
