Off-topic spoken response detection, the task aiming at assessing whether the response is off-topic for the corresponding prompt, is important for automatic spoken assessment system. In many real-world educational applications, off-topic spoken response detection algorithm is required to achieve high recall not only on seen prompts but also on prompts that are unseen during the training process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for off-topic spoken response detection with high off-topic recall on both seen and unseen prompts. We introduce a novel model, Gated Convolutional Bidirectional Attention-based Model (GCBi-AM), where bi-attention mechanism and convolutions are applied to extract topic words of prompt and key-phrases of a response, and gated unit and residual connections between each major layer are introduced to better represent the relevance of response and prompt. Moreover, a new negative sampling method is also proposed to augment training data. Experiment results demonstrate that our new approach can achieve significant improvements on detecting off-topic responses with extremely high on-topic recall rate, for both seen and unseen prompts.
Topic models are one of the most popular methods for learning representations of text, but a major challenge is that any change to the topic model requires mathematically deriving a new inference algorithm. A promising approach to address this problem is autoencoding variational Bayes (AEVB), but it has proven diffi- cult to apply to topic models in practice. We present what is to our knowledge the first effective AEVB based inference method for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which we call Autoencoded Variational Inference For Topic Model (AVITM). This model tackles the problems caused for AEVB by the Dirichlet prior and by component collapsing. We find that AVITM matches traditional methods in accuracy with much better inference time. Indeed, because of the inference network, we find that it is unnecessary to pay the computational cost of running variational optimization on test data. Because AVITM is black box, it is readily applied to new topic models. As a dramatic illustration of this, we present a new topic model called ProdLDA, that replaces the mixture model in LDA with a product of experts. By changing only one line of code from LDA, we find that ProdLDA yields much more interpretable topics, even if LDA is trained via collapsed Gibbs sampling.
Incorporating the side information of text corpus, i.e., authors, time stamps, and emotional tags, into the traditional text mining models has gained significant interests in the area of information retrieval, statistical natural language processing, and machine learning. One branch of these works is the so-called Author Topic Model (ATM), which incorporates the authors's interests as side information into the classical topic model. However, the existing ATM needs to predefine the number of topics, which is difficult and inappropriate in many real-world settings. In this paper, we propose an Infinite Author Topic (IAT) model to resolve this issue. Instead of assigning a discrete probability on fixed number of topics, we use a stochastic process to determine the number of topics from the data itself. To be specific, we extend a gamma-negative binomial process to three levels in order to capture the author-document-keyword hierarchical structure. Furthermore, each document is assigned a mixed gamma process that accounts for the multi-author's contribution towards this document. An efficient Gibbs sampling inference algorithm with each conditional distribution being closed-form is developed for the IAT model. Experiments on several real-world datasets show the capabilities of our IAT model to learn the hidden topics, authors' interests on these topics and the number of topics simultaneously.
In the last decade, a variety of topic models have been proposed for text engineering. However, except Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), most of existing topic models are seldom applied or considered in industrial scenarios. This phenomenon is caused by the fact that there are very few convenient tools to support these topic models so far. Intimidated by the demanding expertise and labor of designing and implementing parameter inference algorithms, software engineers are prone to simply resort to PLSA/LDA, without considering whether it is proper for their problem at hand or not. In this paper, we propose a configurable topic modeling framework named Familia, in order to bridge the huge gap between academic research fruits and current industrial practice. Familia supports an important line of topic models that are widely applicable in text engineering scenarios. In order to relieve burdens of software engineers without knowledge of Bayesian networks, Familia is able to conduct automatic parameter inference for a variety of topic models. Simply through changing the data organization of Familia, software engineers are able to easily explore a broad spectrum of existing topic models or even design their own topic models, and find the one that best suits the problem at hand. With its superior extendability, Familia has a novel sampling mechanism that strikes balance between effectiveness and efficiency of parameter inference. Furthermore, Familia is essentially a big topic modeling framework that supports parallel parameter inference and distributed parameter storage. The utilities and necessity of Familia are demonstrated in real-life industrial applications. Familia would significantly enlarge software engineers' arsenal of topic models and pave the way for utilizing highly customized topic models in real-life problems.
In this paper , we tackle Sentiment Analysis conditioned on a Topic in Twitter data using Deep Learning . We propose a 2-tier approach : In the first phase we create our own Word Embeddings and see that they do perform better than state-of-the-art embeddings when used with standard classifiers. We then perform inference on these embeddings to learn more about a word with respect to all the topics being considered, and also the top n-influencing words for each topic. In the second phase we use these embeddings to predict the sentiment of the tweet with respect to a given topic, and all other topics under discussion.
To unfold the tremendous amount of audiovisual data uploaded daily to social media platforms, effective topic modelling techniques are needed. Existing work tends to apply variants of topic models on text data sets. In this paper, we aim at developing a topic extractor on video transcriptions. The model improves coherence by exploiting neural word embeddings through a graph-based clustering method. Unlike typical topic models, this approach works without knowing the true number of topics. Experimental results on the real-life multimodal data set MuSe-CaR demonstrates that our approach extracts coherent and meaningful topics, outperforming baseline methods. Furthermore, we successfully demonstrate the generalisability of our approach on a pure text review data set.
We propose a topic-guided variational autoencoder (TGVAE) model for text generation. Distinct from existing variational autoencoder (VAE) based approaches, which assume a simple Gaussian prior for the latent code, our model specifies the prior as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) parametrized by a neural topic module. Each mixture component corresponds to a latent topic, which provides guidance to generate sentences under the topic. The neural topic module and the VAE-based neural sequence module in our model are learned jointly. In particular, a sequence of invertible Householder transformations is applied to endow the approximate posterior of the latent code with high flexibility during model inference. Experimental results show that our TGVAE outperforms alternative approaches on both unconditional and conditional text generation, which can generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics.
As we continue to collect and store textual data in a multitude of domains, we are regularly confronted with material whose largely unknown thematic structure we want to uncover. With unsupervised, exploratory analysis, no prior knowledge about the content is required and highly open-ended tasks can be supported. In the past few years, probabilistic topic modeling has emerged as a popular approach to this problem. Nevertheless, the representation of the latent topics as aggregations of semi-coherent terms limits their interpretability and level of detail. This paper presents an alternative approach to topic modeling that maps topics as a network for exploration, based on distributional semantics using learned word vectors. From the granular level of terms and their semantic similarity relations global topic structures emerge as clustered regions and gradients of concepts. Moreover, the paper discusses the visual interactive representation of the topic map, which plays an important role in supporting its exploration.
Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblogging platform, is currently used by over $500M$ users and is considered to be a proxy of Chinese social life. In this study, we contrast the discussions occurring on Sina Weibo and on Chinese language Twitter in order to observe two different strands of Chinese culture: people within China who use Sina Weibo with its government imposed restrictions and those outside that are free to speak completely anonymously. We first propose a simple ad-hoc algorithm to identify topics of Tweets and Weibo. Different from previous works on micro-message topic detection, our algorithm considers topics of the same contents but with different \#tags. Our algorithm can also detect topics for Tweets and Weibos without any \#tags. Using a large corpus of Weibo and Chinese language tweets, covering the period from January $1$ to December $31$, $2012$, we obtain a list of topics using clustered \#tags that we can then use to compare the two platforms. Surprisingly, we find that there are no common entries among the Top $100$ most popular topics. Furthermore, only $9.2\%$ of tweets correspond to the Top $1000$ topics on Sina Weibo platform, and conversely only $4.4\%$ of weibos were found to discuss the most popular Twitter topics. Our results reveal significant differences in social attention on the two platforms, with most popular topics on Sina Weibo relating to entertainment while most tweets corresponded to cultural or political contents that is practically non existent in Sina Weibo.
Add to Chrome
Add to Firefox