Latent Dirichlet Allocation, David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, Michael I. Jordan, 2003Journal of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 3 (MIT Press)DOI: 10.1162/jmlr.2003.3.6.993 - Presents the seminal formulation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and its generative model.
Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective, Kevin P. Murphy, 2012 (MIT Press) - Provides a detailed treatment of LDA within the context of probabilistic machine learning, including its generative story and inference methods.
Probabilistic topic models, David M. Blei, 2012Communications of the ACM, Vol. 55 (ACM)DOI: 10.1145/2133806.2133826 - Provides an accessible overview of probabilistic topic models, including LDA, from a creator's perspective.