Sprite: Generalizing Topic Models with Structured Priors

Abstract

We introduce Sprite, a family of topic models that incorporates structure into model priors as a function of underlying components. The structured priors can be constrained to model topic hierarchies, factorizations, correlations, and supervision, allowing Sprite to be tailored to particular settings. We demonstrate this flexibility by constructing a Sprite-based model to jointly infer topic hierarchies and author perspective, which we apply to corpora of political debates and online reviews. We show that the model learns intuitive topics, outperforming several other topic models at predictive tasks.

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