Statistical Methods for NLP

Document and Topic Clustering, K-Means,

Mixture Models, Expectation-Maximization

Sameer Maskey

Week 8, March 2010

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Topics for Today

Document, Topic Clustering

K-Means

Mixture Models

Expectation Maximization

2
Document Clustering

Previously we classified Documents into Two Classes

 Hockey (Class1) and Baseball (Class2)

We had human labeled data
 Supervised learning

What if we do not have manually tagged documents
 Can we still classify documents?

Document clustering

Unsupervised Learning

3
Classification vs. Clustering

Supervised Training Unsupervised Training

of Classification Algorithm of Clustering Algorithm

4
Clusters for Classification

Automatically Found Clusters

can be used for Classification

5
Document Clustering
Baseball Docs ?
Which cluster does the new document
belong to?

Hockey Docs

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Document Clustering

Cluster the documents in ‘N’ clusters/categories

For classification we were able to estimate parameters using

labeled data
 Perceptrons – find the parameters that decide the separating
hyperplane
 Naïve Bayes – count the number of times word occurs in the
given class and normalize

Not evident on how to find separating hyperplane when no

labeled data available

Not evident how many classes we have for data when we do
not have labels

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Document Clustering Application

Even though we do not know human labels automatically
induced clusters could be useful News Clusters

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Document Clustering Application

A Map of Yahoo!, Mappa.Mundi Map of the Market with Headlines

Magazine, February 2000. Smartmoney [2]

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How to Cluster Documents with No
Labeled Data?

Treat cluster IDs or class labels as hidden variables

Maximize the likelihood of the unlabeled data

Cannot simply count for MLE as we do not know
which point belongs to which class
 User Iterative Algorithm such as K-Means, EM

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K-Means in Words

Parameters to estimate for K classes Baseball

Let us assume we can model this data Hockey

with mixture of two Gaussians

Start with 2 Gaussians (initialize mu values)

Compute distance of each point to the mu of 2 Gaussians and

assign it to the closest Gaussian (class label (Ck))

Use the assigned points to recompute mu for 2 Gaussians

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K-Means Clustering

Let us define Dataset in D dimension{x1 , x2 , ..., xN }

We want to cluster the data in Kclusters

Let µk be D dimension vector representing clusterK

Let us define rnk for each xn such that

rnk ∈ {0, 1} where k = 1, ..., K and
rnk = 1 if xn is assigned to cluster k

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Distortion Measure

N


K
J= rnk ||xn − µk ||2
n=1 k=1

Represents sum of squares of distances to mu_k from each data point

We want to minimize J

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Estimating Parameters

We can estimate parameters by doing 2 step

iterative process

 Minimize J with respect to rnk

Step 1

Keep µk fixed

 Minimize J with respect to µk

Step 2

Keep rnk fixed

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  Minimize J with respect to rnk
Step 1

Keep µk fixed

Optimize for each n separately by choosing rnk for k that

gives minimum ||x − r ||2
n nk

rnk = 1 if k = argminj ||xn − µj ||2

= 0 otherwise

Assign each data point to the cluster that is the closest

Hard decision to cluster assignment

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  Minimize J with respect to µk
Step 2

Keep rnk fixed

J is quadratic in µk . Minimize by setting derivative w.rt. µk to

zero

n rnk xn
µk = 
n rnk

Take all the points assigned to cluster K and re-estimate the

mean for cluster K

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Document Clustering with K-means

Assuming we have data from Homework 1 but with no labels

for Hockey and Baseball data

We want to be able to categorize a new document into one of
the 2 classes (K=2)

We can extract represent document as feature vectors
 Features can be word id or other NLP features such as POS
tags, word context etc (D=total dimension of Feature vectors)
 N documents are available

Randomly initialize 2 class means

Compute square distance of each point (xn)(D dimension) to
class means (µk)

Assign the point to K for which µk is lowest

Re-compute µk and re-iterate

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K-Means Example

K-means algorithm Illustration [1]

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Mixture Models

Mixture of Gaussians [1]

1 Gaussian may not fit the data

2 Gaussians may fit the data better

Each Gaussian can be a class category

When labeled data not available we can treat class category
as hidden variable

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Mixture of Gaussians with Hidden Variables
 
p(x) = z p(x, z) = z p(z)p(x|z)
Component of
K Mixture



p(x) = πk N (x|µk , k)

k=1

Mixing Covariance
Mean
Component

K
−1
p(x) = k=1 πk
(2π) D/2
1√
(|


|
exp(− 12 (x−µk )T k
(x−µk ))
k

• Mixture models can be linear combinations of other distributions as well

• Mixture of binomial distribution for example
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Conditional Probability of Label Given
Data

Mixture model with parameters mu, sigma and prior can
represent the parameter

We can maximize the data given the model parameters to find
the best parameters

If we know the best parameters we can estimate
p(z =1)p(x|zk =1)
p(zk = 1|x) =
K k
j=1 p(zj =1)p(x|zj =1)


π N (x|µk , k )
=
K k

j=1 πj N (x|µj , j)

This essentially gives us probability of class given the data

i.e label for the given data point
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Maximizing Likelihood

If we had labeled data we could maximize likelihood simply by
counting and normalizing to get mean and variance of
Gaussians for the given classes
N 
l = n=1 log p(xn , yn |π, µ, )
N 
l = n=1 log πyn N (xn |µyn , yn )
(30, 1)
(55, 2)
(24, 1)

If we have two classes C1 and C2 (40, 1)
 Let’s say we have a feature x (35, 2)
…

x = number of words ‘field’
 And class label (y) 

y = 1 hockey or 2 baseball documents
 N (µ1 , 1 )
Find out µi and i from data N (µ2 , 2 )
for both classes
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Maximizing Likelihood for Mixture Model with
Hidden Variables

For a mixture model with a hidden variable
representing 2 classes, log likelihood is
N

l= n=1 logp(xn |π, µ, )

N 1

l= n=1 log y=0 N (xn , y|π, µ, )

N


= n=1 log (π0 N (xn |µ0 , 0 )+π1 N (xn |µ1 , 1 ))

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Log-likelihood for Mixture of Gaussians

 N k 
log p(X|π, µ, ) = n=1 log ( k=1 N (x|µk , k ))

We want to find maximum likelihood of the above log-

likelihood function to find the best parameters that maximize
the data given the model

We can again do iterative process for estimating the log-
likelihood of the above function
 This 2-step iterative process is called Expectation-Maximization

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Explaining Expectation Maximization

EM is like fuzzy K-means Baseball

Hockey

Parameters to estimate for K classes

Let us assume we can model this data

with mixture of two Gaussians (K=2)

Start with 2 Gaussians (initialize mu and sigma values) Expectation

Compute distance of each point to the mu of 2 Gaussians and assign it a soft

class label (Ck)

Use the assigned points to recompute mu and sigma for 2 Gaussians; but
weight the updates with soft labels Maximization

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 Expectation Maximization
An expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used in statistics for
finding maximum likelihood estimates of parameters in
probabilistic models, where the model depends on unobserved
hidden variables.

EM alternates between performing an expectation (E) step, which

computes an expectation of the likelihood by including the latent
variables as if they were observed, and a maximization (M) step,
which computes the maximum likelihood estimates of the
parameters by maximizing the expected likelihood found on the E
step. The parameters found on the M step are then used to begin
another E step, and the process is repeated.

The EM algorithm was explained and given its name in a classic

1977 paper by A. Dempster and D. Rubin in the Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society.
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Estimating Parameters
γ(znk ) = E(znk |xn ) = p(zk = 1|xn )

E-Step

π N (xn |µk , k )
γ(znk ) =
K k

j=1 πj N (xn |µj , j)

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Estimating Parameters

M-step

1
N
µ′k = Nk n=1 γ(znk )xn
′ 1
N ′ ′ T
k = Nk n=1 γ(znk )(xn − µk )(x n − µk)

πk′ = Nk
N
N
where Nk = n=1 γ(znk )

Iterate until convergence of log likelihood
 N k 
log p(X|π, µ, ) = n=1 log ( k=1 N (x|µk , k ))
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EM Iterations

EM iterations [1]
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Clustering Documents with EM

Clustering documents requires representation of

documents in a set of features
 Set of features can be bag of words model
 Features such as POS, word similarity, number of
sentences, etc

Can we use mixture of Gaussians for any kind of
features?

How about mixture of multinomial for document
clustering?

How do we get EM algorithm for mixture of
multinomial?

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Clustering Algorithms

We just described two kinds of clustering algorithms

 K-means
 Expectation Maximization

Expectation-Maximization is a general way to
maximize log likelihood for distributions with hidden
variables
 For example, EM for HMM, state sequences were hidden

For document clustering other kinds of clustering
algorithm exists

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Similarity

While clustering documents we are essentially

finding ‘similar’ documents

How we compute similarity makes a difference in the
performance of clustering algorithm

Some similarity metrics
 Euclidean distance
 Cross Entropy
 Cosine Similarity

Which similarity metric to use?

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Similarity for Words

Edit distance
 Insertion, deletion, substitution
 Dynamic programming algorithm

Longest Common Subsequence

Bigram overlap of characters

Similarity based on meaning
 WordNet synonyms

Similarity based on collocation

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Similarity of Text : Surface, Syntax and
Semantics

Cosine Similarity
 Binary Vectors
 Multinomial Vectors

Edit distance
 Insertion, deletion, substitution

Semantic similarity
 Look beyond surface forms
 WordNet, semantic classes

Syntactic similarity
 Syntactic structure
 Tree Kernels

Many ways to look at similarity and choice of the metric is
important for the type of clustering algorithm we are using

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Clustering Documents

Represent documents as feature vectors

Decide on Similarity Metric for computing similarity

across feature vectors

Use Iterative algorithm that maximize the log-

likelihood of the function with hidden variables that
represent the cluster IDs

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Automatic Labeling of Clusters

How do you automatically label the clusters

For example, how do you find the headline that represent the
news pieces in given topic
 One possible way is to find the most similar sentence to the
centroid of the cluster

Cluster Label 2

Cluster Label 1
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Clustering Sentences by Topic

We can cluster documents, sentences or any

segment of text

Similarity across text segments can take account of
topic similarity

We can still use our unsupervised clustering
algorithm based on K-means or EM
 Similarity needs to be computed at the sentence level

Useful for summarization, question answering, text
categorization

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Summary

Unsupervised clustering algorithms

 K-means
 Expectation Maximization

EM is a general algorithm that can be used to
estimate maximum likelihood of functions with
hidden variables

Similarity Metric is important when clustering
segments of text

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