Global models of document structure using latent permutations

  • Authors:
  • Harr Chen;S. R. K. Branavan;Regina Barzilay;David R. Karger

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • NAACL '09 Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present a novel Bayesian topic model for learning discourse-level document structure. Our model leverages insights from discourse theory to constrain latent topic assignments in a way that reflects the underlying organization of document topics. We propose a global model in which both topic selection and ordering are biased to be similar across a collection of related documents. We show that this space of orderings can be elegantly represented using a distribution over permutations called the generalized Mallows model. Our structure-aware approach substantially outperforms alternative approaches for cross-document comparison and single-document segmentation.