From Outliers to Topics in Language Models: Anticipating Trends in News Corpora
Evangelia Zve, Benjamin Icard, Alice Breton, Lila Sainero, Gauvain Bourgne, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia
Published: 2025/9/26
Abstract
This paper examines how outliers, often dismissed as noise in topic modeling, can act as weak signals of emerging topics in dynamic news corpora. Using vector embeddings from state-of-the-art language models and a cumulative clustering approach, we track their evolution over time in French and English news datasets focused on corporate social responsibility and climate change. The results reveal a consistent pattern: outliers tend to evolve into coherent topics over time across both models and languages.