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         <p>Two weeks ago, I did a presentation for my colleagues of the paper from <span class="citation" data-cites="yurochkin2019_hierar_optim_trans_docum_repres">Yurochkin et al. (<a href="#ref-yurochkin2019_hierar_optim_trans_docum_repres">2019</a>)</span>, from <a href="https://papers.nips.cc/book/advances-in-neural-information-processing-systems-32-2019">NeurIPS 2019</a>. It contains an interesting approach to document classification leading to strong performance, and, most importantly, excellent interpretability.</p>
 <p>This paper seems interesting to me because of it uses two methods with strong theoretical guarantees: optimal transport and topic modelling. Optimal transport looks very promising to me in NLP, and has seen a lot of interest in recent years due to advances in approximation algorithms, such as entropy regularisation. It is also quite refreshing to see approaches using solid results in optimisation, compared to purely experimental deep learning methods.</p>
-<h1 id="introduction-and-motivation">Introduction and motivation</h1>
+<h2 id="introduction-and-motivation">Introduction and motivation</h2>
 <p>The problem of the paper is to measure similarity (i.e. a distance) between pairs of documents, by incorporating <em>semantic</em> similarities (and not only syntactic artefacts), without encountering scalability issues.</p>
 <p>They propose a “meta-distance” between documents, called the hierarchical optimal topic transport (HOTT), providing a scalable metric incorporating topic information between documents. As such, they try to combine two different levels of analysis:</p>
 <ul>
 <li>word embeddings data, to embed language knowledge (via pre-trained embeddings for instance),</li>
 <li>topic modelling methods (e.g. <a href="https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/decomposition.html#latentdirichletallocation">Latent Dirichlet Allocation</a>), to represent semantically-meaningful groups of words.</li>
 </ul>
-<h1 id="background-optimal-transport">Background: optimal transport</h1>
+<h2 id="background-optimal-transport">Background: optimal transport</h2>
 <p>The essential backbone of the method is the Wasserstein distance, derived from optimal transport theory. Optimal transport is a fascinating and deep subject, so I won’t enter into the details here. For an introduction to the theory and its applications, check out the excellent book from <span class="citation" data-cites="peyreComputationalOptimalTransport2019">Peyré and Cuturi (<a href="#ref-peyreComputationalOptimalTransport2019">2019</a>)</span>, (<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00567">available on ArXiv</a> as well). There are also <a href="https://images.math.cnrs.fr/Le-transport-optimal-numerique-et-ses-applications-Partie-1.html?lang=fr">very nice posts</a> (in French) by Gabriel Peyré on the <a href="https://images.math.cnrs.fr/">CNRS maths blog</a>. Many more resources (including slides for presentations) are available at <a href="https://optimaltransport.github.io" class="uri">https://optimaltransport.github.io</a>. For a more complete theoretical treatment of the subject, check out <span class="citation" data-cites="santambrogioOptimalTransportApplied2015">Santambrogio (<a href="#ref-santambrogioOptimalTransportApplied2015">2015</a>)</span>, or, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, <span class="citation" data-cites="villaniOptimalTransportOld2009">Villani (<a href="#ref-villaniOptimalTransportOld2009">2009</a>)</span>.</p>
 <p>For this paper, only a superficial understanding of how the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasserstein_metric">Wasserstein distance</a> works is necessary. Optimal transport is an optimisation technique to lift a distance between points in a given metric space, to a distance between probability <em>distributions</em> over this metric space. The historical example is to move piles of dirt around: you know the distance between any two points, and you have piles of dirt lying around<span><label for="sn-1" class="margin-toggle">⊕</label><input type="checkbox" id="sn-1" class="margin-toggle" /><span class="marginnote"> Optimal transport originated with Monge, and then Kantorovich, both of whom had very clear military applications in mind (either in Revolutionary France, or during WWII). A lot of historical examples move cannon balls, or other military equipment, along a front line.<br />
 <br />
@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ W_1(p, q) = \min_{P \in \mathbb{R}_+^{n\times m}} \sum_{i,j} C_{i,j} P_{i,j}
 <p>Now, how can this be applied to a natural language setting? Once we have word embeddings, we can consider that the vocabulary forms a metric space (we can compute a distance, for instance the euclidean or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity">cosine distance</a>, between two word embeddings). The key is to define documents as <em>distributions</em> over words.</p>
 <p>Given a vocabulary <span class="math inline">\(V \subset \mathbb{R}^n\)</span> and a corpus <span class="math inline">\(D = (d^1, d^2, \ldots, d^{\lvert D \rvert})\)</span>, we represent a document as <span class="math inline">\(d^i \in \Delta^{l_i}\)</span> where <span class="math inline">\(l_i\)</span> is the number of unique words in <span class="math inline">\(d^i\)</span>, and <span class="math inline">\(d^i_j\)</span> is the proportion of word <span class="math inline">\(v_j\)</span> in the document <span class="math inline">\(d^i\)</span>. The word mover’s distance (WMD) is then defined simply as <span class="math display">\[ \operatorname{WMD}(d^1, d^2) = W_1(d^1, d^2). \]</span></p>
 <p>If you didn’t follow all of this, don’t worry! The gist is: if you have a distance between points, you can solve an optimisation problem to obtain a distance between <em>distributions</em> over these points! This is especially useful when you consider that each word embedding is a point, and a document is just a set of words, along with the number of times they appear.</p>
-<h1 id="hierarchical-optimal-transport">Hierarchical optimal transport</h1>
+<h2 id="hierarchical-optimal-transport">Hierarchical optimal transport</h2>
 <p>Using optimal transport, we can use the word mover’s distance to define a metric between documents. However, this suffers from two drawbacks:</p>
 <ul>
 <li>Documents represented as distributions over words are not easily interpretable. For long documents, the vocabulary is huge and word frequencies are not easily understandable for humans.</li>
@@ -98,15 +98,15 @@ W_1(p, q) = \min_{P \in \mathbb{R}_+^{n\times m}} \sum_{i,j} C_{i,j} P_{i,j}
 <p><img src="../images/hott_fig1.jpg" /><span><label for="sn-2" class="margin-toggle">⊕</label><input type="checkbox" id="sn-2" class="margin-toggle" /><span class="marginnote"> Representation of two documents in topic space, along with how the distance was computed between them. Everything is interpretable: from the documents as collections of topics, to the matchings between topics determining the overall distance between the books <span class="citation" data-cites="yurochkin2019_hierar_optim_trans_docum_repres">(Yurochkin et al. <a href="#ref-yurochkin2019_hierar_optim_trans_docum_repres">2019</a>)</span>.<br />
 <br />
 </span></span></p>
-<h1 id="experiments">Experiments</h1>
+<h2 id="experiments">Experiments</h2>
 <p>The paper is very complete regarding experiments, providing a full evaluation of the method on one particular application: document clustering. They use <a href="https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/decomposition.html#latentdirichletallocation">Latent Dirichlet Allocation</a> to compute topics and GloVe for pretrained word embeddings <span class="citation" data-cites="pennington2014_glove">(Pennington, Socher, and Manning <a href="#ref-pennington2014_glove">2014</a>)</span>, and <a href="https://www.gurobi.com/">Gurobi</a> to solve the optimisation problems. Their code is available <a href="https://github.com/IBM/HOTT">on GitHub</a>.</p>
 <p>If you want the details, I encourage you to read the full paper, they tested the methods on a wide variety of datasets, with datasets containing very short documents (like Twitter), and long documents with a large vocabulary (books). With a simple <span class="math inline">\(k\)</span>-NN classification, they establish that HOTT performs best on average, especially on large vocabularies (books, the “gutenberg” dataset). It also has a much better computational performance than alternative methods based on regularisation of the optimal transport problem directly on words. So the hierarchical nature of the approach allows to gain considerably in performance, along with improvements in interpretability.</p>
 <p>What’s really interesting in the paper is the sensitivity analysis: they ran experiments with different word embeddings methods (word2vec, <span class="citation" data-cites="mikolovDistributedRepresentationsWords2013">(Mikolov et al. <a href="#ref-mikolovDistributedRepresentationsWords2013">2013</a>)</span>), and with different parameters for the topic modelling (topic truncation, number of topics, etc). All of these reveal that changes in hyperparameters do not impact the performance of HOTT significantly. This is extremely important in a field like NLP where most of the times small variations in approach lead to drastically different results.</p>
-<h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1>
+<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
 <p>All in all, this paper present a very interesting approach to compute distance between natural-language documents. It is no secret that I like methods with strong theoretical background (in this case optimisation and optimal transport), guaranteeing a stability and benefiting from decades of research in a well-established domain.</p>
 <p>Most importantly, this paper allows for future exploration in document representation with <em>interpretability</em> in mind. This is often added as an afterthought in academic research but is one of the most important topics for the industry, as a system must be understood by end users, often not trained in ML, before being deployed. The notion of topic, and distances as weights, can be understood easily by anyone without significant background in ML or in maths.</p>
 <p>Finally, I feel like they did not stop at a simple theoretical argument, but carefully checked on real-world datasets, measuring sensitivity to all the arbitrary choices they had to take. Again, from an industry perspective, this allows to implement the new approach quickly and easily, being confident that it won’t break unexpectedly without extensive testing.</p>
-<h1 id="references" class="unnumbered">References</h1>
+<h2 id="references" class="unnumbered">References</h2>
 <div id="refs" class="references">
 <div id="ref-mikolovDistributedRepresentationsWords2013">
 <p>Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and Their Compositionality.” In <em>Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26</em>, 3111–9. <a href="http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5021-distributed-representations-of-words-and-phrases-and-their-compositionality.pdf" class="uri">http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5021-distributed-representations-of-words-and-phrases-and-their-compositionality.pdf</a>.</p>