Dirichlet-vMF Mixture Model

Abstract: This document is about the multi-document Von-Mises-Fisher mixture model with a Dirichlet prior, referred to as VMFMix. VMFMix is analogous to Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) in that they can capture the co-occurrence patterns acorss multiple documents. The difference is that in VMFMix, the topic-word distribution is defined on a continuous n-dimensional hypersphere. Hence VMFMix is used to derive topic embeddings, i.e., representative vectors, from multiple sets of embedding vectors. An efficient Variational Expectation-Maximization inference algorithm is derived. The performance of VMFMix on two document classification tasks is reported, with some preliminary analysis.