16,514 research outputs found
Inference and Evaluation of the Multinomial Mixture Model for Text Clustering
In this article, we investigate the use of a probabilistic model for
unsupervised clustering in text collections. Unsupervised clustering has become
a basic module for many intelligent text processing applications, such as
information retrieval, text classification or information extraction. The model
considered in this contribution consists of a mixture of multinomial
distributions over the word counts, each component corresponding to a different
theme. We present and contrast various estimation procedures, which apply both
in supervised and unsupervised contexts. In supervised learning, this work
suggests a criterion for evaluating the posterior odds of new documents which
is more statistically sound than the "naive Bayes" approach. In an unsupervised
context, we propose measures to set up a systematic evaluation framework and
start with examining the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm as the basic
tool for inference. We discuss the importance of initialization and the
influence of other features such as the smoothing strategy or the size of the
vocabulary, thereby illustrating the difficulties incurred by the high
dimensionality of the parameter space. We also propose a heuristic algorithm
based on iterative EM with vocabulary reduction to solve this problem. Using
the fact that the latent variables can be analytically integrated out, we
finally show that Gibbs sampling algorithm is tractable and compares favorably
to the basic expectation maximization approach
Probabilistic Clustering Using Maximal Matrix Norm Couplings
In this paper, we present a local information theoretic approach to
explicitly learn probabilistic clustering of a discrete random variable. Our
formulation yields a convex maximization problem for which it is NP-hard to
find the global optimum. In order to algorithmically solve this optimization
problem, we propose two relaxations that are solved via gradient ascent and
alternating maximization. Experiments on the MSR Sentence Completion Challenge,
MovieLens 100K, and Reuters21578 datasets demonstrate that our approach is
competitive with existing techniques and worthy of further investigation.Comment: Presented at 56th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication,
Control, and Computing, 201
Soft Seeded SSL Graphs for Unsupervised Semantic Similarity-based Retrieval
Semantic similarity based retrieval is playing an increasingly important role
in many IR systems such as modern web search, question-answering, similar
document retrieval etc. Improvements in retrieval of semantically similar
content are very significant to applications like Quora, Stack Overflow, Siri
etc. We propose a novel unsupervised model for semantic similarity based
content retrieval, where we construct semantic flow graphs for each query, and
introduce the concept of "soft seeding" in graph based semi-supervised learning
(SSL) to convert this into an unsupervised model.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on an equivalent question
retrieval problem on the Stack Exchange QA dataset, where our unsupervised
approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models,
and produces comparable results to the best supervised models. Our research
provides a method to tackle semantic similarity based retrieval without any
training data, and allows seamless extension to different domain QA
communities, as well as to other semantic equivalence tasks.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Information
and Knowledge Management (CIKM '17
- …