Topic models have been successfully used for analyzing text documents. However, with existing topic models, many documents are required for training. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based few-shot learning method that can learn a topic model from just a few documents. The neural networks in our model take a small number of documents as inputs, and output topic model priors. The proposed method trains the neural networks such that the expected test likelihood is improved when topic model parameters are estimated by maximizing the posterior probability using the priors based on the EM algorithm. Since each step in the EM algorithm is differentiable, the proposed method can backpropagate the loss through the EM algorithm to train the neural networks. The expected test likelihood is maximized by a stochastic gradient descent method using a set of multiple text corpora with an episodic training framework. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better perplexity than existing methods using three real-world text document sets.
Latent variable models have been a preferred choice in conversational modeling compared to sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models which tend to generate generic and repetitive responses. Despite so, training latent variable models remains to be difficult. In this paper, we propose Latent Topic Conversational Model (LTCM) which augments seq2seq with a neural latent topic component to better guide response generation and make training easier. The neural topic component encodes information from the source sentence to build a global "topic" distribution over words, which is then consulted by the seq2seq model at each generation step. We study in details how the latent representation is learnt in both the vanilla model and LTCM. Our extensive experiments contribute to better understanding and training of conditional latent models for languages. Our results show that by sampling from the learnt latent representations, LTCM can generate diverse and interesting responses. In a subjective human evaluation, the judges also confirm that LTCM is the overall preferred option.
Topic evolution modeling has received significant attentions in recent decades. Although various topic evolution models have been proposed, most studies focus on the single document corpus. However in practice, we can easily access data from multiple sources and also observe relationships between them. Then it is of great interest to recognize the relationship between multiple text corpora and further utilize this relationship to improve topic modeling. In this work, we focus on a special type of relationship between two text corpora, which we define as the "lead-lag relationship". This relationship characterizes the phenomenon that one text corpus would influence the topics to be discussed in the other text corpus in the future. To discover the lead-lag relationship, we propose a jointly dynamic topic model and also develop an embedding extension to address the modeling problem of large-scale text corpus. With the recognized lead-lag relationship, the similarities of the two text corpora can be figured out and the quality of topic learning in both corpora can be improved. We numerically investigate the performance of the jointly dynamic topic modeling approach using synthetic data. Finally, we apply the proposed model on two text corpora consisting of statistical papers and the graduation theses. Results show the proposed model can well recognize the lead-lag relationship between the two corpora, and the specific and shared topic patterns in the two corpora are also discovered.
There is a great need for technologies that can predict the mortality of patients in intensive care units with both high accuracy and accountability. We present joint end-to-end neural network architectures that combine long short-term memory (LSTM) and a latent topic model to simultaneously train a classifier for mortality prediction and learn latent topics indicative of mortality from textual clinical notes. For topic interpretability, the topic modeling layer has been carefully designed as a single-layer network with constraints inspired by LDA. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that our models significantly outperform prior models that are based on LDA topics in mortality prediction. However, we achieve limited success with our method for interpreting topics from the trained models by looking at the neural network weights.
Originally designed to model text, topic modeling has become a powerful tool for uncovering latent structure in domains including medicine, finance, and vision. The goals for the model vary depending on the application: in some cases, the discovered topics may be used for prediction or some other downstream task. In other cases, the content of the topic itself may be of intrinsic scientific interest. Unfortunately, even using modern sparse techniques, the discovered topics are often difficult to interpret due to the high dimensionality of the underlying space. To improve topic interpretability, we introduce Graph-Sparse LDA, a hierarchical topic model that leverages knowledge of relationships between words (e.g., as encoded by an ontology). In our model, topics are summarized by a few latent concept-words from the underlying graph that explain the observed words. Graph-Sparse LDA recovers sparse, interpretable summaries on two real-world biomedical datasets while matching state-of-the-art prediction performance.
While generative models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have proven fruitful in topic modeling, they often require detailed assumptions and careful specification of hyperparameters. Such model complexity issues only compound when trying to generalize generative models to incorporate human input. We introduce Correlation Explanation (CorEx), an alternative approach to topic modeling that does not assume an underlying generative model, and instead learns maximally informative topics through an information-theoretic framework. This framework naturally generalizes to hierarchical and semi-supervised extensions with no additional modeling assumptions. In particular, word-level domain knowledge can be flexibly incorporated within CorEx through anchor words, allowing topic separability and representation to be promoted with minimal human intervention. Across a variety of datasets, metrics, and experiments, we demonstrate that CorEx produces topics that are comparable in quality to those produced by unsupervised and semi-supervised variants of LDA.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) data can be represented as discrete counts over a high dimensional set of possible procedures, diagnoses, and medications. Supervised topic models present an attractive option for incorporating EHR data as features into a prediction problem: given a patient's record, we estimate a set of latent factors that are predictive of the response variable. However, existing methods for supervised topic modeling struggle to balance prediction quality and coherence of the latent factors. We introduce a novel approach, the prediction-focused topic model, that uses the supervisory signal to retain only features that improve, or do not hinder, prediction performance. By removing features with irrelevant signal, the topic model is able to learn task-relevant, interpretable topics. We demonstrate on a EHR dataset and a movie review dataset that compared to existing approaches, prediction-focused topic models are able to learn much more coherent topics while maintaining competitive predictions.
Probabilistic topic modeling is a popular choice as the first step of crosslingual tasks to enable knowledge transfer and extract multilingual features. While many multilingual topic models have been developed, their assumptions on the training corpus are quite varied, and it is not clear how well the models can be applied under various training conditions. In this paper, we systematically study the knowledge transfer mechanisms behind different multilingual topic models, and through a broad set of experiments with four models on ten languages, we provide empirical insights that can inform the selection and future development of multilingual topic models.
Analysis of mobile app reviews has shown its important role in requirement engineering, software maintenance and evolution of mobile apps. Mobile app developers check their users' reviews frequently to clarify the issues experienced by users or capture the new issues that are introduced due to a recent app update. App reviews have a dynamic nature and their discussed topics change over time. The changes in the topics among collected reviews for different versions of an app can reveal important issues about the app update. A main technique in this analysis is using topic modeling algorithms. However, app reviews are short texts and it is challenging to unveil their latent topics over time. Conventional topic models suffer from the sparsity of word co-occurrence patterns while inferring topics for short texts. Furthermore, these algorithms cannot capture topics over numerous consecutive time-slices. Online topic modeling algorithms speed up the inference of topic models for the texts collected in the latest time-slice by saving a fraction of data from the previous time-slice. But these algorithms do not analyze the statistical-data of all the previous time-slices, which can confer contributions to the topic distribution of the current time-slice. We propose Adaptive Online Biterm Topic Model (AOBTM) to model topics in short texts adaptively. AOBTM alleviates the sparsity problem in short-texts and considers the statistical-data for an optimal number of previous time-slices. We also propose parallel algorithms to automatically determine the optimal number of topics and the best number of previous versions that should be considered in topic inference phase. Automatic evaluation on collections of app reviews and real-world short text datasets confirm that AOBTM can find more coherent topics and outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.
This paper studies the topic modeling problem of tagged documents and images. Higher-order relations among tagged documents and images are major and ubiquitous characteristics, and play positive roles in extracting reliable and interpretable topics. In this paper, we propose the tag-topic models (TTM) to depict such higher-order topic structural dependencies within the Markov random field (MRF) framework. First, we use the novel factor graph representation of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic models from the MRF perspective, and present an efficient loopy belief propagation (BP) algorithm for approximate inference and parameter estimation. Second, we propose the factor hypergraph representation of TTM, and focus on both pairwise and higher-order relation modeling among tagged documents and images. Efficient loopy BP algorithm is developed to learn TTM, which encourages the topic labeling smoothness among tagged documents and images. Extensive experimental results confirm the incorporation of higher-order relations to be effective in enhancing the overall topic modeling performance, when compared with current state-of-the-art topic models, in many text and image mining tasks of broad interests such as word and link prediction, document classification, and tag recommendation.
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