  We investigate ways in which to improve the interpretability of LDA topic
models by better analyzing and visualizing their outputs. We focus on examining
what we refer to as topic similarity networks: graphs in which nodes represent
latent topics in text collections and links represent similarity among topics.
We describe efficient and effective approaches to both building and labeling
such networks. Visualizations of topic models based on these networks are shown
to be a powerful means of exploring, characterizing, and summarizing large
collections of unstructured text documents. They help to "tease out"
non-obvious connections among different sets of documents and provide insights
into how topics form larger themes. We demonstrate the efficacy and
practicality of these approaches through two case studies: 1) NSF grants for
basic research spanning a 14 year period and 2) the entire English portion of
Wikipedia.
