Leif Jonsson


2020

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Sparse Parallel Training of Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Topic Models
Alexander Terenin | Måns Magnusson | Leif Jonsson
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

To scale non-parametric extensions of probabilistic topic models such as Latent Dirichlet allocation to larger data sets, practitioners rely increasingly on parallel and distributed systems. In this work, we study data-parallel training for the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) topic model. Based upon a representation of certain conditional distributions within an HDP, we propose a doubly sparse data-parallel sampler for the HDP topic model. This sampler utilizes all available sources of sparsity found in natural language - an important way to make computation efficient. We benchmark our method on a well-known corpus (PubMed) with 8m documents and 768m tokens, using a single multi-core machine in under four days.