How Does Latent Semantic Analysis Work? A Visualisation Approach

TL;DR

This paper visually demonstrates how latent semantic analysis (LSA) extracts semantic meaning from documents by illustrating the process through heatmaps and analogies, making its inner workings more understandable.

Contribution

It introduces a visualization approach using heatmaps and analogies to explain the semantic extraction process of LSA.

Findings

LSA blurs distinctions between words to reveal semantic relationships

Visualization clarifies how LSA captures semantic meaning

Analogies help in understanding LSA's compression process

Abstract

By using a small example, an analogy to photographic compression, and a simple visualization using heatmaps, we show that latent semantic analysis (LSA) is able to extract what appears to be semantic meaning of words from a set of documents by blurring the distinctions between the words.