11,733 research outputs found
Hierarchical Topic Mining via Joint Spherical Tree and Text Embedding
Mining a set of meaningful topics organized into a hierarchy is intuitively
appealing since topic correlations are ubiquitous in massive text corpora. To
account for potential hierarchical topic structures, hierarchical topic models
generalize flat topic models by incorporating latent topic hierarchies into
their generative modeling process. However, due to their purely unsupervised
nature, the learned topic hierarchy often deviates from users' particular needs
or interests. To guide the hierarchical topic discovery process with minimal
user supervision, we propose a new task, Hierarchical Topic Mining, which takes
a category tree described by category names only, and aims to mine a set of
representative terms for each category from a text corpus to help a user
comprehend his/her interested topics. We develop a novel joint tree and text
embedding method along with a principled optimization procedure that allows
simultaneous modeling of the category tree structure and the corpus generative
process in the spherical space for effective category-representative term
discovery. Our comprehensive experiments show that our model, named JoSH, mines
a high-quality set of hierarchical topics with high efficiency and benefits
weakly-supervised hierarchical text classification tasks.Comment: KDD 2020 Research Track. (Code: https://github.com/yumeng5/JoSH
The Discrete Infinite Logistic Normal Distribution
We present the discrete infinite logistic normal distribution (DILN), a
Bayesian nonparametric prior for mixed membership models. DILN is a
generalization of the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) that models
correlation structure between the weights of the atoms at the group level. We
derive a representation of DILN as a normalized collection of gamma-distributed
random variables, and study its statistical properties. We consider
applications to topic modeling and derive a variational inference algorithm for
approximate posterior inference. We study the empirical performance of the DILN
topic model on four corpora, comparing performance with the HDP and the
correlated topic model (CTM). To deal with large-scale data sets, we also
develop an online inference algorithm for DILN and compare with online HDP and
online LDA on the Nature magazine, which contains approximately 350,000
articles.Comment: This paper will appear in Bayesian Analysis. A shorter version of
this paper appeared at AISTATS 2011, Fort Lauderdale, FL, US
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
Nested Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes
We develop a nested hierarchical Dirichlet process (nHDP) for hierarchical
topic modeling. The nHDP is a generalization of the nested Chinese restaurant
process (nCRP) that allows each word to follow its own path to a topic node
according to a document-specific distribution on a shared tree. This alleviates
the rigid, single-path formulation of the nCRP, allowing a document to more
easily express thematic borrowings as a random effect. We derive a stochastic
variational inference algorithm for the model, in addition to a greedy subtree
selection method for each document, which allows for efficient inference using
massive collections of text documents. We demonstrate our algorithm on 1.8
million documents from The New York Times and 3.3 million documents from
Wikipedia.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, Special Issue on Bayesian Nonparametric
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