@phdthesis{2021:peshave:disseration_thematic_phrase_extract,type={phdthesis},publisher={University of
Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)},school={University of Maryland, Baltimore County
(UMBC)},institution={University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)},address={Baltimore, MD,
USA},isbn={9798762104609},id={2021:peshave:disseration_thematic_phrase_extract},year={2021},month={12},day={19},date={2021-12-19},title={Unsupervised
Thematic Phrase Extraction from Single Text Artifacts},author={Peshave,
Akshay},url={http://akshaypeshave.com/publications/phd_dissertation/9798762104609/index.html},note={Doctoral
Dissertation. Advisor: Oates, Tim. Order # 28864143}}
Unsupervised Thematic Phrase Extraction from Single Text Artifacts
Peshave, Akshay
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) 2021 December
ABSTRACT : Automated knowledge discovery
is central to augmenting knowledge acquisition and elicitation by humans from vast amounts of
content. Precise and concise representations, both structured and semi-structured, of knowledge
contained in textual content have the potential to boost human productivity. Further, they can
reduce, if not eliminate, human error and bias in knowledge retrieval and curation by humans
from vast collections of content to use for their subsequent knowledge-based
tasks.Conventionally, knowledge discovery in text (KDT) approaches and paradigms have been
designed to build domain knowledge by processing large collections of text documents and
applying them to process individual text documents using this acquired domain knowledge for
guidance. Consequently, these approaches are blind to the finer topical features of the
individual document because these features are abstracted by topic models that infer topicality
in the context of the whole corpus.We need an unsupervised method to extract topical or thematic
phrases from a single text document without the need to access entire collections of texts or
background domain or language dictionaries and thesauri. Further, the method should not abstract
fine-grained thematic phrases contained in the document, thus, enabling its application for
hierarchical knowledge representation and downstream document level text analytics tasks.This
work describes ThemaPhrase (ThP), a novel framework for unsupervised extraction of thematic
phrases from single text artifacts. The framework operates without the need for corpus wide
statistics and external domain knowledge which makes it domain agnostic. ThP configurations are
more robust than competing methods to topic-to-partitions ratio and varying average token
occurrence frequencies in a document. Different configurations of ThemaPhrase are identified
that outperform competing methods in extracting thematic phrases that represent the topicality
of a document at varied granularities.Further, this work shows that sentence pre-filtering based
on thematic phrases and thematic words helps improve extractive summarization for texts, such as
patents, that have relatively higher occurrence frequencies of tokens where the baseline
TextRank summarizer underperforms. ThemaPhrase configurations that outperform competing thematic
phrase extraction methods in extractive summarization using sentence pre-filtering are
discussed.