A Phrase-Discovering Topic Model Using Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Processes
Robert Lindsey, William P. Headden, Michael Stipicevic · 2012
Topic models traditionally rely on the bagof-words assumption. In data mining applications, this often results in end-users being presented with inscrutable lists of topical unigrams, single words inferred as representative of their topics. In this article, we present a hierarchical generative probabilistic model of topical phrases. The model simultaneously infers the location, length, and topic of phrases within a corpus and relaxes the bagof-words assumption within phrases by using a hierarchy of Pitman-Yor processes. We use Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques for approximate inference in the model and perform slice sampling to learn its hyperparameters. We show via an experiment on human subjects that our model finds substantially better, more interpretable topical phrases than do competing models. 1