5,709 research outputs found
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
Probabilistic abductive logic programming using Dirichlet priors
Probabilistic programming is an area of research that aims to develop general inference algorithms for probabilistic models expressed as probabilistic programs whose execution corresponds to inferring the parameters of those models. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic programming language (PPL) based on abductive logic programming for performing inference in probabilistic models involving categorical distributions with Dirichlet priors. We encode these models as abductive logic programs enriched with probabilistic definitions and queries, and show how to execute and compile them to boolean formulas. Using the latter, we perform generalized inference using one of two proposed Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms: an adaptation of uncollapsed Gibbs sampling from related work and a novel collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS). We show that CGS converges faster than the uncollapsed version on a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) task using synthetic data. On similar data, we compare our PPL with LDA-specific algorithms and other PPLs. We find that all methods, except one, perform similarly and that the more expressive the PPL, the slower it is. We illustrate applications of our PPL on real data in two variants of LDA models (Seed and Cluster LDA), and in the repeated insertion model (RIM). In the latter, our PPL yields similar conclusions to inference with EM for Mallows models
Modeling Documents as Mixtures of Persons for Expert Finding
In this paper we address the problem of searching for knowledgeable
persons within the enterprise, known as the expert finding (or
expert search) task. We present a probabilistic algorithm using the assumption
that terms in documents are produced by people who are mentioned
in them.We represent documents retrieved to a query as mixtures
of candidate experts language models. Two methods of personal language
models extraction are proposed, as well as the way of combining
them with other evidences of expertise. Experiments conducted with the
TREC Enterprise collection demonstrate the superiority of our approach
in comparison with the best one among existing solutions
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.
Information Retrieval Models
Many applications that handle information on the internet would be completely\ud
inadequate without the support of information retrieval technology. How would\ud
we find information on the world wide web if there were no web search engines?\ud
How would we manage our email without spam filtering? Much of the development\ud
of information retrieval technology, such as web search engines and spam\ud
filters, requires a combination of experimentation and theory. Experimentation\ud
and rigorous empirical testing are needed to keep up with increasing volumes of\ud
web pages and emails. Furthermore, experimentation and constant adaptation\ud
of technology is needed in practice to counteract the effects of people that deliberately\ud
try to manipulate the technology, such as email spammers. However,\ud
if experimentation is not guided by theory, engineering becomes trial and error.\ud
New problems and challenges for information retrieval come up constantly.\ud
They cannot possibly be solved by trial and error alone. So, what is the theory\ud
of information retrieval?\ud
There is not one convincing answer to this question. There are many theories,\ud
here called formal models, and each model is helpful for the development of\ud
some information retrieval tools, but not so helpful for the development others.\ud
In order to understand information retrieval, it is essential to learn about these\ud
retrieval models. In this chapter, some of the most important retrieval models\ud
are gathered and explained in a tutorial style
Part of Speech Based Term Weighting for Information Retrieval
Automatic language processing tools typically assign to terms so-called
weights corresponding to the contribution of terms to information content.
Traditionally, term weights are computed from lexical statistics, e.g., term
frequencies. We propose a new type of term weight that is computed from part of
speech (POS) n-gram statistics. The proposed POS-based term weight represents
how informative a term is in general, based on the POS contexts in which it
generally occurs in language. We suggest five different computations of
POS-based term weights by extending existing statistical approximations of term
information measures. We apply these POS-based term weights to information
retrieval, by integrating them into the model that matches documents to
queries. Experiments with two TREC collections and 300 queries, using TF-IDF &
BM25 as baselines, show that integrating our POS-based term weights to
retrieval always leads to gains (up to +33.7% from the baseline). Additional
experiments with a different retrieval model as baseline (Language Model with
Dirichlet priors smoothing) and our best performing POS-based term weight, show
retrieval gains always and consistently across the whole smoothing range of the
baseline
Extending weighting models with a term quality measure
Weighting models use lexical statistics, such as term frequencies, to derive term weights, which are used to estimate the relevance of a document to a query. Apart from the removal of stopwords, there is no other consideration of the quality of words that are being ‘weighted’. It is often assumed that term frequency is a good indicator for a decision to be made as to how relevant a document is to a query. Our intuition is that raw term frequency could be enhanced to better discriminate between terms. To do so, we propose using non-lexical features to predict the ‘quality’ of words, before they are weighted for retrieval. Specifically, we show how parts of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs) can help estimate how informative a word generally is, regardless of its relevance to a query/document. Experimental results with two standard TREC collections show that integrating the proposed term quality to two established weighting models enhances retrieval performance, over a baseline that uses the original weighting models, at all times
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