Provided are a word latent topic estimation device and a word latent topic estimation method which are capable of hierarchically performing processing and which are capable of rapidly estimating latent topics of a word while taking into consideration a mixed state of topics. The present invention is provided with: a document data addition unit (11) which inputs a document which includes one or more words; a level setting unit (12) which sets a number of topics at each level in accordance with a hierarchical structure of topics for hierarchically estimating latent topics of a word; a higher-level constraint creation unit (15) which, on the basis of results of topic estimation at a given level with regard to a word within the document, creates a higher-level constraint indicating an identifier of a topic for which there is a possibility of being assigned to the word and a probability of being assigned to the topic; and a higher-level-constraint-attached topic estimation unit (13) which, when estimating the probability of each word being assigned to each topic, refers to the higher-order constraint, uses the probability of being assigned to a parent topic at the higher level as a weight, and performs estimation processing to a lower-level topic.
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