# Large Language Model and Formal Concept Analysis: a comparative study for Topic Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01933/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Topic Modeling in Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04907/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00524/) (2023)
- [ClusterLLM: Large Language Models as a Guide for Text Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14871/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Offer an Alternative to the Traditional Approach of Topic Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16248/) (2024)
- [Prompting Large Language Models for Topic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09693/) (2023)
- [What Should We Engineer in Prompts? Training Humans in Requirement-Driven LLM Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08775/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Decompositions of Implicit Content Enable Better Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14583/) (2023)
- [Abstractive Summarization of Large Document Collections Using GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05690/) (2023)
- [CNC-TP: Classifier Nominal Concept Based on Top-Pertinent Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01976/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Topic modeling is a research field finding increasing applications: historically from document retrieving, to sentiment analysis and text summarization. Large Language Models (LLM) are currently a major trend in text processing, but few works study their usefulness for this task. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has recently been presented as a candidate for topic modeling, but no real applied case study has been conducted. In this work, we compare LLM and FCA to better understand their strengths and weakneses in the topic modeling field. FCA is evaluated through the CREA pipeline used in past experiments on topic modeling and visualization, whereas GPT-5 is used for the LLM. A strategy based on three prompts is applied with GPT-5 in a zero-shot setup: topic generation from document batches, merging of batch results into final topics, and topic labeling. A first experiment reuses the teaching materials previously used to evaluate CREA, while a second experiment analyzes 40 research articles in information systems to compare the extracted topics with the underling subfields.