Topic Modeling for Humans, and the Advance of NLP

Topic identification is a top-of-the-list need for organizations working with large volumes of online, social, and enterprise text. Along with entity resolution, relation extraction, summarization, and sentiment analysis, topic modeling is a key natural language processing (NLP) function. Premise number 2: Applied NLP -- text analytics -- remains as much art as science, requiring a combination of domain and technical expertise. How better to explore topic modeling and NLP advances than via an interview with a leading practitioner? This article features an interview with Lev Konstantinovskiy, a data scientist who is community manager for gensim, which offers open-source topic modeling for Python programmers.