Semi-Supervised Prediction-Constrained Topic Models

Supervisory signals can help topic models discover low-dimensional data representations which are useful for a specific prediction task. We propose a framework for training supervised latent Dirichlet allocation that balances two goals: faithful generative explanations of high-dimensional data and accurate prediction of associated class labels. Existing approaches fail to balance these goals by not properly handling a fundamental asymmetry: the intended application is always predicting labels from data, not data from labels. Our new prediction-constrained objective for training generative models coherently integrates supervisory signals even when only a small fraction of training examples are labeled. We demonstrate improved prediction quality compared to previous supervised topic models, achieving results competitive with high-dimensional logistic regression on text analysis and electronic health records tasks while simultaneously learning interpretable topics.