Deep Dirichlet Multinomial Regression

Dirichlet Multinomial Regression (DMR) and other supervised topic models can incorporate arbitrary document-level features to inform topic priors. However, their ability to model corpora are limited by the representation and selection of these features – a choice the topic modeler must make. Instead, we seek models that can learn the feature representations upon which to condition topic selection. We present deep Dirichlet Multinomial Regression (dDMR), a generative topic model that simultaneously learns document feature representations and topics. We evaluate dDMR on three datasets: New York Times articles with fine-grained tags, Amazon product reviews with product images, and Reddit posts with subreddit identity. dDMR learns representations that outperform DMR and LDA according to heldout perplexity and are more effective at downstream predictive tasks as the number of topics grows. Additionally, human subjects judge dDMR topics as being more representative of associated document features. Finally, we find that supervision leads to faster convergence as compared to an LDA baseline and that dDMR’s model fit is less sensitive to training parameters than DMR.