Generalized Component Analysis for Text with Heterogeneous Attributes

We present a class of richly structured, undirected hidden variable models suitable for simultaneously modeling text along with other attributes encoded in different modalities. Our model generalizes techniques such as Principal Component Analysis to heterogeneous data types. In contrast to other approaches, this framework allows modalities such as words, authors and timestamps to be captured in their natural, probabilistic encodings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the task of author prediction from 13 years of the NIPS conference proceedings and for a recipient prediction task using a 10-month academic email archive of a researcher. Our approach should be more broadly applicable to many real-world applications where one wishes to efficiently make predictions for a large number of potential outputs -- such as targeted advertising