Abstract:

Deep learning (DL) is a powerful approach to modeling complex and large scale data. However, DL models lack interpretable quantities and calibrated uncertainty. In contrast, probabilistic graphical modeling (PGM) provides a framework for formulating an interpretable generative process of data and a way to express uncertainty about what we do not know. How can we develop machine learning methods that bring together the expressivity of DL with the interpretability and calibration of PGM to build flexible models endowed with an interpretable latent structure that can be fit efficiently? I call this line of research deep probabilistic graphical modeling (DPGM). In this talk, I will discuss my work on developing DPGM for text data. In particular, I will show how DPGM enables flexible and interpretable topic modeling at large scale, unlocking several known challenges. Furthermore, I will describe how we can account for both local and long-range context, under the DPGM framework, to build a flexible sequential document model that leads to state-of-the-art performance on a downstream document classification task.