The distribution of words in a topic is a draw from the Dirichlet distribution:

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

This true/false item asks about the distribution that governs how words are laid out within a topic. 
Option 1: True. In many topic models, particularly those in the family of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and related Bayesian formulations, the per-topic distribution over the vocabulary is modeled as a draw from a Dirichlet distribution. This Dirichlet prior encodes beliefs about how likely each word is within a given topic and ensures a proper probability distribution over all vocabulary terms. 
Option 2: False. A common misconception is to think that words within a topic are drawn directly from a fixed categorical distribution without a prior. In practice, the Dirichlet prior is used to generate a probability vector over words (a distribution over the vocabulary) for each topic, from which word assignments are then drawn according to that distribution in conjunction with a generative process. The Dirichlet serves as the conjugate prior for multinomial word counts, not as something unrelated. 
Additional nuance: while the explicit generation of individual word tokens for a document involves multinomial draws conditioned on the topic-specific word distribution, the underlying assumption about the topic’s word probabilities themselves is indeed a Dirichlet-distributed vector. This helps capture uncertainty and allows for sharing statistical strength across topics and words. 
In summary, recognizing the topic's word distribution as Dirichlet-distributed aligns with standard Bayesian topic modeling frameworks, whereas claiming there is no Dirichlet prior would misstate the common generative approach.

SP2025.B69.DAT.562.24 COMPLETE Quiz #3 AFTER VIDEO 2: The Dirichlet Distribution

The distribution of words in a topic is a draw from the Dirichlet distribution:

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