Discovering Diverse and Salient Threads in Document Collections

We propose a novel probabilistic technique for modeling and extracting salient structure from large document collections. As in clustering and topic modeling, our goal is to provide an organizing perspective into otherwise overwhelming amounts of information. We are particularly interested in revealing and exploiting relationships between documents. To this end, we focus on extracting diverse sets of threads---singly-linked, coherent chains of important documents. To illustrate, we extract research threads from citation graphs and construct timelines from news articles. Our method is highly scalable, running on a corpus of over 30 million words in about four minutes, more than 75 times faster than a dynamic topic model. Finally, the results from our model more closely resemble human news summaries according to several metrics and are also preferred by human judges.