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  • 1.  Bayesian Text Analysis

    Posted 04-27-2021 10:49
    Hello All!

    I'm really glad this community exists, and I'm excited to see where it goes in future years.  My interest in text analysis of all sorts has been growing in recent years, and I know it is a massive field.  Many of the references I've seen take what I'll term 'deep learning' approaches, using neural networks or Transformers.  Alternatively, there are the various approaches of text embedding followed by some classifier/regression method, like SVM or random forest or XGBoost.

    As somebody whose research is in Bayesian methodologies (not in text analysis), my question was whether any Bayesian approaches to text analysis have been developed.  Could anybody in this community point me to any useful references in this regard?  Anything and everything would be much appreciated!

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    Brian King
    PhD Student
    Rice University
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  • 2.  RE: Bayesian Text Analysis

    Posted 04-28-2021 01:08
    Hi Brian,

    Topic models, Latent Dirichlet Allocation and its cousins, are almost all Bayesian. For a fuller exploration of Bayesian methods in text analysis, see this short book https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1681735261

    While topic models have fallen out of favor in machine learning circles, they're still quite popular in statistics and are actually related to many deep learning approaches, IMO. Both are mapping word counts to latent spaces. 

    Tommy