Abstract

This article investigates the application of spiking neural networks (SNNs) to the problem of topic modeling (TM): the identification of significant groups of words that represent human-understandable topics in large sets of documents. Our research is based on the hypothesis that an SNN that implements the Hebbian learning paradigm is capable of becoming specialized in the detection of statistically significant word patterns in the presence of adequately tailored sequential input. To support this hypothesis, we propose a novel spiking topic model (STM) that transforms text into a sequence of spikes and uses that sequence to train single-layer SNNs. In STM, each SNN neuron represents one topic, and each of the neuron’s weights corresponds to one word. STM synaptic connections are modified according to spike-timing-dependent plasticity; after training, the neurons’ strongest weights are interpreted as the words that represent topics. We compare the performance of STM with four other TM methods Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Biterm Topic Model (BTM), Embedding Topic Model (ETM) and BERTopic on three datasets: 20Newsgroups, BBC news, and AG news. The results demonstrate that STM can discover high-quality topics and successfully compete with comparative classical methods. This sheds new light on the possibility of the adaptation of SNN models in unsupervised natural language processing.