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Evaluating a Topic Modelling Approach to Measuring Corpus Similarity

Web corpora are often constructed automatically, and their contents are therefore often not well understood. One technique for assessing the composition of such a web corpus is to empirically measure its similarity to a reference corpus whose composition is known. In this paper we evaluate a number of measures of corpus similarity, including a method based on topic modelling which has not been previously evaluated for this task. To evaluate these methods we use known-similarity corpora that have been previously used for this purpose, as well as a number of newly-constructed known-similarity corpora targeting differences in genre, topic, time, and region. Our findings indicate that, overall, the topic modelling approach did not improve on a chi-square method that had previously been found to work well for measuring corpus similarity.