Latent semantic models : a study of probabilistic models for text in information retrieval

Mini Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2020.

Large volumes of text is being generated every minute which necessitates effective and robust tools to retrieve relevant information. Supervised learning approaches have been explored extensively for this task, but it is difficult to secure large collections of labelled data to train this set of models. Since a supervised approach is too expensive in terms of annotating data, we consider unsupervised methods such as topic models and word embeddings in order to represent corpora in lower dimensional semantic spaces. Furthermore, we investigate different distance measures to capture similarity between indexed documents based on their semantic distributions. These include cosine, soft cosine and Jensen-Shannon similarities. This collection of methods discussed in this work allows for the unsupervised association of semantic similar texts which has a wide range of applications such as fake news detection, sociolinguistics and sentiment analysis.

The Hub Internship

Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research

Statistics

MSc (Mathematical Statistics)

Unrestricted