TITLE

Topic Models, Latent Space Models, Sparse Coding, and All That: A systematic understanding of probabilistic semantic extraction in large corpus

PRESENTERS

Eric Xing

ABSTRACT
Probabilistic topic models have recently gained much popularity in informational retrieval and related areas. Via such models, one can project high-dimensional objects such as text documents into a low dimensional space where their latent semantics are captured and modeled; can integrate multiple sources of information---to "share statistical strength" among components of a hierarchical probabilistic model; and can structurally display and classify the otherwise unstructured object collections. However, to many practitioners, how topic models work, what to and not to expect from a topic model, how is it different from and related to classical matrix algebraic techniques such as LSI, NMF in NLP, how to empower topic models to deal with complex scenarios such as multimodal data, contractual text in social media, evolving corpus, or presence of supervision such as labeling and rating, how to make topic modeling computationally tractable even on web-scale data, etc., in a principled way, remain unclear. In this tutorial, I will demystify the conceptual, mathematical, and computational issues behind all such problems surrounding the topic models and their applications by presenting a systematic overview of the mathematical foundation of topic modeling, and its connections to a number of related methods popular in other fields such as the LDA, admixture model, mixed membership model, latent space models, and sparse coding. I will offer a simple and unifying view of all these techniques under the framework multi-view latent space embedding, and online the roadmap of model extension and algorithmic design toward different applications in IR and NLP. A main theme of this tutorial that tie together a wide range of issues and problems will build on the "probabilistic graphical model" formalism, a formalism that exploits the conjoined talents of graph theory and probability theory to build complex models out of simpler pieces. I will use this formalism as an main aid to discuss both the mathematical underpinnings for the models and the related computational issues in a unified, simplistic, transparent, and actionable fashion.
OUTLINE
  1. Overview of topic models
    1.1: From LSI to pLSI, to LDA, a historical account.
    1.2: Related models in other domains
    1.3: On latent space embedding

  2. Computational Challenges and two classical algorithmic paths
    2.1: Variational inference and variants
    2.2: Basic MCMC

  3. Scenario I: Multimodal data
    3.1: text and photos
    3.2: text and social networks
    3.3: on general multi-view modeling and data integration

  4. Scenario II: when supervision is available
    4.1: discrete labels: text categories
    4.2: continuous scores: user rating
    4.3: on general supervised topic models: it is a matter of choice of loss function and model constraints

  5. Scenario III: what if I don't know the total number of topics, and the number changes?
    5.1: Dirichlet Process and Hierarchical DP for infinite topic models
    5.2: Nested CRP for infinite topic hierarchy

  6. Scenario IV: Topic evolution in Streaming Corpus.
    6.1: Dynamic topic model for steaming text
    6.2: Story-line detection with dynamic infinite hierarchical topic models: a unified approach g

  7: Advanced subjects: Sparsity in topic modeling (Optional)
    7.1: needs and challenges
    7.2: Probabilistic approaches: sparse additive generative models
    7.3: Optimization and sparse coding approach: sparse topic coding

  8: Scalability, Complexity, and Fast algorithms
    8.1: complexity and learnability of topic models
    8.2: online inference and learning
    8.3: distributed inference and learning

  9: Other apps (Optional)
    9.1: Machine translation
    9.2: Image segmentation
    9.3: Genetic ancestry
PRESENTER BIOS
Dr. Eric Xing is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His principal research interests lie in the development of machine learning and statistical methodology; especially for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in social and biological systems. Professor Xing received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Rutgers University, and another Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His current work involves, 1) foundations of statistical learning, including theory and algorithms for estimating time/space varying-coefficient models, sparse structured input/output models, and nonparametric Bayesian models; 2) computational and statistical analysis of gene regulation, genetic variation, and disease associations; and 3) large-scale information & intelligent system in social networks, computer vision, and natural language processing. Professor Xing has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, and is an associate editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics, the IEEE Transaction of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology, an Action Editor of the Machine Learning journal, and a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Advisory Group. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science, the IBM collaborative research award, the United States Air Force Young Investigator Award, and best paper awards in a number of premier conferences including UAI, ACL, SDM, and ISMB.