MaartenGr / MaartenGr/BERTopic
`MaximalMarginalRelevance` makes 2N embedding calls instead of 1
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- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
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- Forks
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- Avg merge
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- Merged PRs (30d)
- 5
Description
### Feature request
`MaximalMarginalRelevance.extract_topics()` calls the embedding model **twice per topic**: once for the individual candidate words and once for the concatenated sentence. With N topics, this means 2N separate embedding calls — each with its own model inference overhead, GPU kernel launch, or API round-trip (for remote embedding services like OpenAI).
Batch all words and all sentences across every topic into a single embedding call instead of 2N.
### Motivation
For a typical run with 50 topics using OpenAI embeddings, this is 100 API calls where 1 would suffice. The improvement scales linearly with topic count and is most impactful with API-based embedding models where each call has network latency and rate-limiting overhead.
### Your contribution
I can submit a PR that collects all candidate words and all topic sentences across all topics into a single flat list, makes 1 embedding call, then slices the result array back into per-topic chunks using pre-computed index ranges.
This reduces 2N calls to exactly 1 call, with identical output.
I've already been prototyping this in my fork, so I can open a PR quickly if this looks like a good direction.
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Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by locating MaximalMarginalRelevance.extract_topics() in the BERTopic source and inspect where it embeds candidate words and topic sentences. Confirm the current per-topic calls and verify that the completed change makes one combined embedding call while preserving identical per-topic outputs.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- machine-learning, performance
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 68/100