# BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 801 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Topic Modeling in Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04907/) (2019)
- [Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08240/) (2020)
- [Top2Vec: Distributed Representations of Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09470/) (2020)
- [Pre-training is a Hot Topic: Contextualized Document Embeddings Improve Topic Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03974/) (2020)
- [Accelerated Hierarchical Density Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07321/) (2017)
- [Is Automated Topic Model Evaluation Broken?: The Incoherence of Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02173/) (2021)
- [Tired of Topic Models? Clusters of Pretrained Word Embeddings Make for Fast and Good Topics too!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14914/) (2020)
- [Cross-lingual Contextualized Topic Models with Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07737/) (2020)
- [Topic Modelling Meets Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00498/) (2021)
- [Topic Modeling with Contextualized Word Representation Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12626/) (2020)
- [Improving Topic Models with Latent Feature Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06306/) (2018)
- [Understanding State Preferences With Text As Data: Introducing the UN General Debate Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02774/) (2017)
- [Topic Modeling over Short Texts by Incorporating Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08496/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 801)

- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [HelpSteer2: Open-source dataset for training top-performing reward models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08673/) (2024)
- [Aegis2.0: A Diverse AI Safety Dataset and Risks Taxonomy for Alignment of LLM Guardrails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09004/) (2025)
- [ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13995/) (2025)
- [Interpreting CLIP with Sparse Linear Concept Embeddings (SpLiCE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10376/) (2024)
- [The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs' Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09085/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Text Generation with Differential Privacy: A Simple and Practical Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14348/) (2022)
- [Hidden Persuaders: LLMs' Political Leaning and Their Influence on Voters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24190/) (2024)
- [A Bibliometric Review of Large Language Models Research from 2017 to 2023](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02020/) (2023)
- [HoneyComb: A Flexible LLM-Based Agent System for Materials Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00135/) (2024)
- [Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03017/) (2024)
- [SUGARCREPE++ Dataset: Vision-Language Model Sensitivity to Semantic and Lexical Alterations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11171/) (2024)
- [The Unequal Opportunities of Large Language Models: Revealing Demographic Bias through Job Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02053/) (2023)
- [In ChatGPT We Trust? Measuring and Characterizing the Reliability of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08979/) (2023)
- [Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model For Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10814/) (2024)
- [Controllable Safety Alignment: Inference-Time Adaptation to Diverse Safety Requirements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08968/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Offer an Alternative to the Traditional Approach of Topic Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16248/) (2024)
- [FASTopic: Pretrained Transformer is a Fast, Adaptive, Stable, and Transferable Topic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17978/) (2024)
- [Search Arena: Analyzing Search-Augmented LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05334/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Previously Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07991/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at System Prompt Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12197/) (2025)
- [Mem2ActBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Term Memory Utilization in Task-Oriented Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19935/) (2026)
- [WizMap: Scalable Interactive Visualization for Exploring Large Machine Learning Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09328/) (2023)
- [LLMs are Biased Teachers: Evaluating LLM Bias in Personalized Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14012/) (2024)
- [MOSAIC: Modeling Social AI for Content Dissemination and Regulation in Multi-Agent Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07830/) (2025)
- [Sparse Autoencoders for Hypothesis Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04382/) (2025)
- [Prompting Large Language Models for Topic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09693/) (2023)
- [FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22257/) (2024)
- [Examining Identity Drift in Conversations of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00804/) (2024)
- [MindScape Study: Integrating LLM and Behavioral Sensing for Personalized AI-Driven Journaling Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09570/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Topic models can be useful tools to discover latent topics in collections of documents. Recent studies have shown the feasibility of approach topic modeling as a clustering task. We present BERTopic, a topic model that extends this process by extracting coherent topic representation through the development of a class-based variation of TF-IDF. More specifically, BERTopic generates document embedding with pre-trained transformer-based language models, clusters these embeddings, and finally, generates topic representations with the class-based TF-IDF procedure. BERTopic generates coherent topics and remains competitive across a variety of benchmarks involving classical models and those that follow the more recent clustering approach of topic modeling.