Unsupervised Prediction of Citation Influences

Publication repositories contain an abundance of information about the evolution of scientific research areas. We address the problem of creating a visualization of a research area that describes the flow of topics between papers, quantifies the impact that papers have on each other, and helps to identify key contributions. To this end, we devise a probabilistic topic model that explains the generation of documents; the model incorporates the aspects of topical innovation and topical inheritance via citations. We evaluate the model's ability to predict the strength of influence of citations against manually rated citations.