Gaussian Process Topic Models

Abstract

We introduce Gaussian Process Topic Models (GPTMs), a new family of topic models which can leverage a kernel among documents while extracting correlated topics. GPTMs can be considered a systematic generalization of the Correlated Topic Models (CTMs) using ideas from Gaussian Process (GP) based embedding. Since GPTMs work with both a topic covariance matrix and a document kernel matrix, learning GPTMs involves a novel component—solving a suitable Sylvester equation capturing both topic and document dependencies. The efficacy of GPTMs is demonstrated with experiments evaluating the quality of both topic modeling and embedding.