  Topic modelling has been a successful technique for text analysis for almost
twenty years. When topic modelling met deep neural networks, there emerged a
new and increasingly popular research area, neural topic models, with over a
hundred models developed and a wide range of applications in neural language
understanding such as text generation, summarisation and language models. There
is a need to summarise research developments and discuss open problems and
future directions. In this paper, we provide a focused yet comprehensive
overview of neural topic models for interested researchers in the AI community,
so as to facilitate them to navigate and innovate in this fast-growing research
area. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first review focusing on this
specific topic.
