Automatic analysis of concepts or semantic relations from text documents enables not only an efficient acquisition of relevant information, but also a comparison of documents in the concept level. We present a multiple cause model-based approach to text analysis, where latent topics are automatically extracted from document sets and similarity between documents is measured by semantic kernels constructed from the extracted topics. In our approach, a document is assumed to be generated by various combinations of underlying topics. A topic is defined by a set of words that are related to the same topic or cooccur frequently within a document. In a network representing a multiple-cause model, each topic is identified by a group of words having high connection weights from a latent node. In order to facilitate teaming and inferences in multiple-cause models, some approximation methods are required and we utilize an approximation by Helmholtz machines. In an experiment on TDT-2 data set, we extract sets of meaningful words where each set contains some theme-specific terms. Using semantic kernels constructed from latent topics extracted by multiple cause models, we also achieve significant improvements over the basic vector space model in terms of retrieval effectiveness.