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Unpublished Paper
Group and Topic Discovery from Relations and Their Attributes
(2006)
  • Xuerui Wang
  • Natasha Mohanty
  • Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract
We present a probabilistic generative model of entity relationships and their attributes that simultaneously discovers groups among the entities and topics among the corresponding textual attributes. Block-models of relationship data have been studied in social network analysis for some time. Here we simultaneously cluster in several modalities at once, incorporating the attributes (here, words) associated with certain relationships. Significantly, joint inference allows the discovery of topics to be guided by the emerging groups, and vice-versa. We present experimental results on two large data sets: sixteen years of bills put before the U.S. Senate, comprising their corresponding text and voting records, and thirteen years of similar data from the United Nations. We show that in comparison with traditional, separate latent-variable models for words, or Blockstructures for votes, the Group-Topic model's joint inference discovers more cohesive groups and improved topics.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2006
Comments
This is the pre-published version harvested from CIIR.
Citation Information
Xuerui Wang, Natasha Mohanty and Andrew McCallum. "Group and Topic Discovery from Relations and Their Attributes" (2006)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/andrew_mccallum/126/