Adapting LDA Model to Discover Author-Topic Relations for Email Analysis

Analyzing the author and topic relations in email corpus is an important issue in both social network analysis and text mining. The AuthorTopic model is a statistical model that identifies the author-topic relations. However, in its inference process, it ignores the information at the document level, i.e., the co-occurrence of words within documents are not taken into account in deriving topics. This may not be suitable for email analysis. We propose to adapt the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for analyzing email corpus. This method takes into account both the author-document relations and the document-topic relations. We use the Author-Topic model as the baseline method and propose measures to compare our method against the Author-Topic model. We did empirical analysis based on experimental results on both simulated data sets and the real Enron email data set to show that our method obtains better performance than the Author-Topic model.