"creepy animism" in the sense of "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared"? https://vimeo.com/83687791

I think they're talking about this one:

http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1183143727

This work uses the correlated topic model, which extends LDA to model correlations among the extracted topics.

Edit: and this one [pdf]:

http://www.icml2010.org/papers/384.pdf

Well, but he's conditioning on "machine learning" already (the little caption on the histogram says "P(neural network | machine learning"), so that most likely filters out the straight neuroscience papers.

I think "solid foundation in statistics" refers to the fact that LDA has a proper generative model of documents and topics, while LSA doesn't -- so that it's easier to reason about LDA and to build more complex models on top of it.

He actually had a blog:

http://caderno.josesaramago.org

or, in Spanish:

http://cuaderno.josesaramago.org

His Spanish was funny, because it was gramatically flawless but spoken with a heavy Portuguese accent.