---

name: topic-modeling description: "Build, fit, query, and mutate BERTopic topic models." metadata: disco-role: operating package: BERTopic package-version: "0.17.4" parent-skill: bertopic disable-model-invocation: true license: MIT

Topic Modeling

Use this sub-skill for BERTopic lifecycle work when the task is about building or changing a topic model rather than choosing embeddings, tuning c-TF-IDF/vectorizers, labeling topics, plotting, or saving models.

Covered workflows

• Construct BERTopic with default or custom reducer/cluster components.
• Fit, fit_transform, transform, and partial_fit on documents, precomputed embeddings, or image-aligned inputs.
• Run guided, supervised, semi-supervised, manual, zero-shot, online, and multimodal fitting variants.
• Query topics, frequencies, documents, representative docs, and topic search results.
• Reduce, merge, delete, and outlier-correct topics.
• Merge multiple fitted models.
• Inspect parameter state with get_params.

Not covered here

• Embedding backend selection or download troubleshooting.
• c-TF-IDF/vectorizer tuning, seed-word weighting, or online vocabulary tuning details.
• Topic representation and labeling models.
• Visualizations, comparison plots, or downstream analysis.
• Save/load, hub publishing, or other serialization paths.

Working notes

• fit / fit_transform accept documents, optional embeddings, optional images, and optional y.
• partial_fit is the streaming path; use a reducer and clusterer that support partial_fit.
• transform only works on fitted models with an inference-capable cluster path.
• find_topics needs a live embedding_model; if you only have precomputed embeddings, provide a local offline embedder or route the request elsewhere.
• reduce_outliers returns a new topic list; if you need refreshed representations afterward, hand that job to the vectorizer/representation sub-skill.
• merge_topics, delete_topics, and reduce_topics mutate the fitted model in place and update topic_mapper_.
• partial_fit tracks the current batch in topics_; keep your own history if you need a cumulative stream view.
• images are supported for fit-time and transform-time multimodal workflows; partial_fit does not take images.

References

• references/api-reference.md
• references/workflows.md
• references/troubleshooting.md
• scripts/smoke_topic_model.py