In addition to facilitating discovery of topical trends (Gardner et al., 2010), topic modeling is used for a wide variety of problems including document classification (Rubin et al., 2012), information retrieval (Wei and Croft, 2006), author identification (Rosen-Zvi et al., 2004), and sentiment analysis (Titov and McDonald, 2008).
the most compelling use of topic models is to help users understand large datasets (Chuang et al., 2012).