18,089 research outputs found
Topic Models Conditioned on Arbitrary Features with Dirichlet-multinomial Regression
Although fully generative models have been successfully used to model the
contents of text documents, they are often awkward to apply to combinations of
text data and document metadata. In this paper we propose a
Dirichlet-multinomial regression (DMR) topic model that includes a log-linear
prior on document-topic distributions that is a function of observed features
of the document, such as author, publication venue, references, and dates. We
show that by selecting appropriate features, DMR topic models can meet or
exceed the performance of several previously published topic models designed
for specific data.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2008
A network approach to topic models
One of the main computational and scientific challenges in the modern age is
to extract useful information from unstructured texts. Topic models are one
popular machine-learning approach which infers the latent topical structure of
a collection of documents. Despite their success --- in particular of its most
widely used variant called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) --- and numerous
applications in sociology, history, and linguistics, topic models are known to
suffer from severe conceptual and practical problems, e.g. a lack of
justification for the Bayesian priors, discrepancies with statistical
properties of real texts, and the inability to properly choose the number of
topics. Here we obtain a fresh view on the problem of identifying topical
structures by relating it to the problem of finding communities in complex
networks. This is achieved by representing text corpora as bipartite networks
of documents and words. By adapting existing community-detection methods --
using a stochastic block model (SBM) with non-parametric priors -- we obtain a
more versatile and principled framework for topic modeling (e.g., it
automatically detects the number of topics and hierarchically clusters both the
words and documents). The analysis of artificial and real corpora demonstrates
that our SBM approach leads to better topic models than LDA in terms of
statistical model selection. More importantly, our work shows how to formally
relate methods from community detection and topic modeling, opening the
possibility of cross-fertilization between these two fields.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, code available at https://topsbm.github.io
Syntactic Topic Models
The syntactic topic model (STM) is a Bayesian nonparametric model of language
that discovers latent distributions of words (topics) that are both
semantically and syntactically coherent. The STM models dependency parsed
corpora where sentences are grouped into documents. It assumes that each word
is drawn from a latent topic chosen by combining document-level features and
the local syntactic context. Each document has a distribution over latent
topics, as in topic models, which provides the semantic consistency. Each
element in the dependency parse tree also has a distribution over the topics of
its children, as in latent-state syntax models, which provides the syntactic
consistency. These distributions are convolved so that the topic of each word
is likely under both its document and syntactic context. We derive a fast
posterior inference algorithm based on variational methods. We report
qualitative and quantitative studies on both synthetic data and hand-parsed
documents. We show that the STM is a more predictive model of language than
current models based only on syntax or only on topics
The supervised hierarchical Dirichlet process
We propose the supervised hierarchical Dirichlet process (sHDP), a
nonparametric generative model for the joint distribution of a group of
observations and a response variable directly associated with that whole group.
We compare the sHDP with another leading method for regression on grouped data,
the supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) model. We evaluate our method
on two real-world classification problems and two real-world regression
problems. Bayesian nonparametric regression models based on the Dirichlet
process, such as the Dirichlet process-generalised linear models (DP-GLM) have
previously been explored; these models allow flexibility in modelling nonlinear
relationships. However, until now, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP)
mixtures have not seen significant use in supervised problems with grouped data
since a straightforward application of the HDP on the grouped data results in
learnt clusters that are not predictive of the responses. The sHDP solves this
problem by allowing for clusters to be learnt jointly from the group structure
and from the label assigned to each group.Comment: 14 page
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