Twitter has been a prominent social media platform for mining population-level health data and accurate clustering of health-related tweets into topics is important for extracting relevant health insights. In this work, we propose deep convolutional autoencoders for learning compact representations of health-related tweets, further to be employed in clustering. We compare our method to several conventional tweet representation methods including bag-of-words, term frequency-inverse document frequency, Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Non-negative Matrix Factorization with 3 different clustering algorithms. Our results show that the clustering performance using proposed representation learning scheme significantly outperforms that of conventional methods for all experiments of different number of clusters. In addition, we propose a constraint on the learned representations during the neural network training in order to further enhance the clustering performance. All in all, this study introduces utilization of deep neural network-based architectures, i.e., deep convolutional autoencoders, for learning informative representations of health-related tweets.
Numerous works on topic modeling of tweets are available as well. Topic models are generative models, relying on the idea that a given tweet is a mixture of topics, where a topic is a probability distribution over words @cite_45 . Even though the objective in topic modeling is slightly different than that of pure clustering, representing each tweet as a topic vector is essentially a way of dimensionality reduction or feature extraction and can further be followed by a clustering algorithm. Proposed topic modeling methods include conventional approaches or variants of them such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) @cite_8 @cite_2 @cite_42 @cite_32 @cite_20 @cite_48 @cite_54 @cite_27 @cite_43 @cite_40 @cite_29 and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) @cite_22 @cite_5 . Note that topic models such as LDA are based on the notion that words belonging to a topic are more likely to appear in the same document and do not assume a distance metric between discovered topics.
@cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_48 @cite_54 @cite_42 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_43 @cite_27 @cite_45 @cite_40 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_20
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Topic models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), posit that documents are drawn from admixtures of distributions over words, known as topics. The inference problem of recovering topics from admixtures, is NP-hard. Assuming separability, a strong assumption, [4] gave the first provable algorithm for inference. For LDA model, [6] gave a provable algorithm using tensor-methods. But [4,6] do not learn topic vectors with bounded @math error (a natural measure for probability vectors). Our aim is to develop a model which makes intuitive and empirically supported assumptions and to design an algorithm with natural, simple components such as SVD, which provably solves the inference problem for the model with bounded @math error. A topic in LDA and other models is essentially characterized by a group of co-occurring words. Motivated by this, we introduce topic specific Catchwords, group of words which occur with strictly greater frequency in a topic than any other topic individually and are required to have high frequency together rather than individually. A major contribution of the paper is to show that under this more realistic assumption, which is empirically verified on real corpora, a singular value decomposition (SVD) based algorithm with a crucial pre-processing step of thresholding, can provably recover the topics from a collection of documents drawn from Dominant admixtures. Dominant admixtures are convex combination of distributions in which one distribution has a significantly higher contribution than others. Apart from the simplicity of the algorithm, the sample complexity has near optimal dependence on @math , the lowest probability that a topic is dominant, and is better than [4]. Empirical evidence shows that on several real world corpora, both Catchwords and Dominant admixture assumptions hold and the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms the state of the art [5]. The problem of topic modeling can be seen as a generalization of the clustering problem, in that it posits that observations are generated due to multiple latent factors (e.g., the words in each document are generated as a mixture of several active topics, as opposed to just one). This increased representational power comes at the cost of a more challenging unsupervised learning problem of estimating the topic probability vectors (the distributions over words for each topic), when only the words are observed and the corresponding topics are hidden. We provide a simple and efficient learning procedure that is guaranteed to recover the parameters for a wide class of mixture models, including the popular latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model. For LDA, the procedure correctly recovers both the topic probability vectors and the prior over the topics, using only trigram statistics (i.e., third order moments, which may be estimated with documents containing just three words). The method, termed Excess Correlation Analysis (ECA), is based on a spectral decomposition of low order moments (third and fourth order) via two singular value decompositions (SVDs). Moreover, the algorithm is scalable since the SVD operations are carried out on @math matrices, where @math is the number of latent factors (e.g. the number of topics), rather than in the @math -dimensional observed space (typically @math ). Topic Model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) makes assumption that topic assignment of different words are conditionally independent. In this paper, we propose a new model Extended Global Topic Random Field (EGTRF) to model non-linear dependencies between words. Specifically, we parse sentences into dependency trees and represent them as a graph, and assume the topic assignment of a word is influenced by its adjacent words and distance-2 words. Word similarity information learned from large corpus is incorporated to enhance word topic assignment. Parameters are estimated efficiently by variational inference and experimental results on two datasets show EGTRF achieves lower perplexity and higher log predictive probability. Algorithms such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have achieved significant progress in modeling word document relationships. These algorithms assume each word in the document was generated by a hidden topic and explicitly model the word distribution of each topic as well as the prior distribution over topics in the document. Given these parameters, the topics of all words in the same document are assumed to be independent. In this paper, we propose modeling the topics of words in the document as a Markov chain. Specifically, we assume that all words in the same sentence have the same topic, and successive sentences are more likely to have the same topics. Since the topics are hidden, this leads to using the well-known tools of Hidden Markov Models for learning and inference. We show that incorporating this dependency allows us to learn better topics and to disambiguate words that can belong to different topics. Quantitatively, we show that we obtain better perplexity in modeling documents with only a modest increase in learning and inference complexity.