A Topic Modeling Toolbox Using Belief Propagation

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is an important hierarchical Bayesian model for probabilistic topic modeling, which attracts worldwide interests and touches on many important applications in text mining, computer vision and computational biology. This paper introduces a topic modeling toolbox (TMBP) based on the belief propagation (BP) algorithms. TMBP toolbox is implemented by MEX C++/Matlab/Octave for either Windows 7 or Linux. Compared with existing topic modeling packages, the novelty of this toolbox lies in the BP algorithms for learning LDA-based topic models. The current version includes BP algorithms for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), author-topic models (ATM), relational topic models (RTM), and labeled LDA (LaLDA). This toolbox is an ongoing project and more BP-based algorithms for various topic models will be added in the near future. Interested users may also extend BP algorithms for learning more complicated topic models. The source codes are freely available under the GNU General Public Licence, Version 1.0 at https://mloss.org/software/view/399/.Comment: 4 page

Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles

In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform, and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects: first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User Interfaces 201

Modeling Topic and Role Information in Meetings using the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process

Abstract. In this paper, we address the modeling of topic and role information in multiparty meetings, via a nonparametric Bayesian model called the hierarchical Dirichlet process. This model provides a powerful solution to topic modeling and a flexible framework for the incorporation of other cues such as speaker role information. We present our modeling framework for topic and role on the AMI Meeting Corpus, and illustrate the effectiveness of the approach in the context of adapting a baseline language model in a large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition system for multiparty meetings. The adapted LM produces significant improvements in terms of both perplexity and word error rate.