The hidden Markov Topic model: a probabilistic model of semantic representation

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a model that learns semantic representations from the distributional statistics of language. This model, however, goes beyond the common bag-of-words paradigm, and infers semantic representations by taking into account the inherent sequential nature of linguistic data. The model we describe, which we refer to as a Hidden Markov Topics model, is a natural extension of the current state of the art in Bayesian bag-of-words models, that is, the Topics model of Griffiths, Steyvers, and Tenenbaum (2007), preserving its strengths while extending its scope to incorporate more fine-grained linguistic information.

Keywords: Bayesian models; Computational models; Probabilistic models; Semantic memory; Semantic representation.