Prior-Aware Composition Inference for Spectral Topic Models

Abstract

Spectral algorithms operate on matrices or tensors of word co-occurrence to learn latent topics. These approaches remove the dependence on the original documents and produce substantial gains in efficiency with provable inference, but at a cost: the models can no longer infer any information about individual documents. Thresholded Linear Inverse is developed to learn document-specific topic compositions, but its linear characteristics limit the inference quality without considering any prior information on topic distributions. We propose two novel estimation methods that respect previously unclear prior structures of spectral topic models. Experiments on a variety of synthetic to real collections demonstrate that our Prior-Aware Dual Decomposition outperforms the baseline method, whereas our Prior-Aware Manifold Iteration performs even better on short realistic data.