Topic model and document-clustering evaluations either use automated metrics that align poorly with human preferences or require expert labels that are intractable to scale. We design a scalable human evaluation protocol and a corresponding automated approximation that reflect practitioners' real-world usage of models. Annotators -- or an LLM-based proxy -- review text items assigned to a topic or cluster, infer a category for the group, then apply that category to other documents. Using this protocol, we collect extensive crowdworker annotations of outputs from a diverse set of topic models on two datasets. We then use these annotations to validate automated proxies, finding that the best LLM proxies are statistically indistinguishable from a human annotator and can therefore serve as a reasonable substitute in automated evaluations. Package, web interface, and data are at https://github.com/ahoho/proxann
@article{arxiv.2507.00828,
title = {ProxAnn: Use-Oriented Evaluations of Topic Models and Document Clustering},
author = {Alexander Hoyle and Lorena Calvo-Bartolomé and Jordan Boyd-Graber and Philip Resnik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.00828},
year = {2025}
}