In this paper, we propose a deep, globally normalized topic model that incorporates structural relationships connecting documents in socially generated corpora, such as online forums. Our model (1) captures discursive interactions along observed reply links in addition to traditional topic information, and (2) incorporates latent distributed representations arranged in a deep architecture, which enables a GPU-based mean-field inference procedure that scales efficiently to large data. We apply our model to a new social media dataset consisting of 13M comments mined from the popular internet forum Reddit, a domain that poses significant challenges to models that do not account for relationships connecting user comments. We evaluate against existing methods across multiple metrics including perplexity and metadata prediction, and qualitatively analyze the learned interaction patterns.
Many topic models such as LDA @cite_7 treat documents as independent mixtures, yet this approach fails to model how comments interact with one another throughout a larger discourse if such connections exist in the data. Other work has considered modeling hierarchy in topics @cite_2 . These models form hierarchical representations of topics themselves, but still treat documents as independent. While this approach can succeed in learning topics of various granularities, it does not explicitly track how topics interact in the context of a nested conversation.
@cite_7 @cite_2
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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. In this work, we address the problem of joint modeling of text and citations in the topic modeling framework. We present two different models called the Pairwise-Link-LDA and the Link-PLSA-LDA models. The Pairwise-Link-LDA model combines the ideas of LDA [4] and Mixed Membership Block Stochastic Models [1] and allows modeling arbitrary link structure. However, the model is computationally expensive, since it involves modeling the presence or absence of a citation (link) between every pair of documents. The second model solves this problem by assuming that the link structure is a bipartite graph. As the name indicates, Link-PLSA-LDA model combines the LDA and PLSA models into a single graphical model. Our experiments on a subset of Citeseer data show that both these models are able to predict unseen data better than the baseline model of Erosheva and Lafferty [8], by capturing the notion of topical similarity between the contents of the cited and citing documents. Our experiments on two different data sets on the link prediction task show that the Link-PLSA-LDA model performs the best on the citation prediction task, while also remaining highly scalable. In addition, we also present some interesting visualizations generated by each of the models.