Nonparametric Bayes Pachinko Allocation

Abstract

Recent advances in topic models have explored complicated structured distributions to represent topic correlation. For example, the pachinko allocation model (PAM) captures arbitrary, nested, and possibly sparse correlations between topics using a directed acyclic graph (DAG). While PAM provides more flexibility and greater expressive power than previous models like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), it is also more difficult to determine the appropriate topic structure for a specific dataset. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric Bayesian prior for PAM based on a variant of the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP). Although the HDP can capture topic correlations defined by nested data structure, it does not automatically discover such correlations from unstructured data. By assuming an HDP-based prior for PAM, we are able to learn both the number of topics and how the topics are correlated. We evaluate our model on synthetic and real-world text datasets, and show that nonparametric PAM achieves performance matching the best of PAM without manually tuning the number of topics.