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Topic Modeling in Embedding Spaces (arxiv.org)
2 points by Anon84 on Jul 12, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: This topic model puts words and topics in one word-meaning space, so a word's chance depends on how close it is to its topic's vector. It beat the classic LDA model on topic quality and prediction, even with huge vocabularies full of rare words.

Abstract

Topic modeling analyzes documents to learn meaningful patterns of words. However, existing topic models fail to learn interpretable topics when working with large and heavy-tailed vocabularies. To this end, we develop the Embedded Topic Model (ETM), a generative model of documents that marries traditional topic models with word embeddings. In particular, it models each word with a categorical distribution whose natural parameter is the inner product between a word embedding and an embedding of its assigned topic. To fit the ETM, we develop an efficient amortized variational inference algorithm. The ETM discovers interpretable topics even with large vocabularies that include rare words and stop words. It outperforms existing document models, such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), in terms of both topic quality and predictive performance.

Adji B. Dieng, Francisco J. R. Ruiz, David M. Blei
arXiv:1907.04907 · cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jul 8, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Code can be found at https://github.com/adjidieng/ETM

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