The paper is very complete regarding experiments, providing a full evaluation of the method on one particular application: document clustering. They use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to compute topics and GloVe for pretrained word embeddings (Moschitti, Pang, and Daelemans 2014), and Gurobi to solve the optimisation problems. Their code is available on Github.
+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 \(k\)-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.
+What’s really interesting in the paper is the sensitivity analysis: they ran experiments with different word embeddings methods (word2vec, (Mikolov et al. 2013)), 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.
+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.
+Most importantly, this paper allows for future exploration in document representation with interpretability 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.
+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, confident that it won’t break unexpectedly without extensive testing.
Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and Their Compositionality.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26, edited by C. J. C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani, and K. Q. Weinberger, 3111–9. Curran Associates, Inc. http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5021-distributed-representations-of-words-and-phrases-and-their-compositionality.pdf.
+Moschitti, Alessandro, Bo Pang, and Walter Daelemans, eds. 2014. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014, October 25-29, 2014, Doha, Qatar, A Meeting of Sigdat, a Special Interest Group of the ACL. ACL. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/volumes/D14-1/.
+Peyré, Gabriel, and Marco Cuturi. 2019. “Computational Optimal Transport.” Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning 11 (5-6): 355–206. https://doi.org/10.1561/2200000073.
The paper is very complete regarding experiments, providing a full evaluation of the method on one particular application: document clustering. They use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to compute topics and GloVe for pretrained word embeddings (Moschitti, Pang, and Daelemans 2014), and Gurobi to solve the optimisation problems. Their code is available on Github.
+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 \(k\)-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.
+What’s really interesting in the paper is the sensitivity analysis: they ran experiments with different word embeddings methods (word2vec, (Mikolov et al. 2013)), 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.
+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.
+Most importantly, this paper allows for future exploration in document representation with interpretability 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.
+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, confident that it won’t break unexpectedly without extensive testing.
Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and Their Compositionality.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26, edited by C. J. C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani, and K. Q. Weinberger, 3111–9. Curran Associates, Inc. http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5021-distributed-representations-of-words-and-phrases-and-their-compositionality.pdf.
+Moschitti, Alessandro, Bo Pang, and Walter Daelemans, eds. 2014. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014, October 25-29, 2014, Doha, Qatar, A Meeting of Sigdat, a Special Interest Group of the ACL. ACL. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/volumes/D14-1/.
+Peyré, Gabriel, and Marco Cuturi. 2019. “Computational Optimal Transport.” Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning 11 (5-6): 355–206. https://doi.org/10.1561/2200000073.
The paper is very complete regarding experiments, providing a full evaluation of the method on one particular application: document clustering. They use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to compute topics and GloVe for pretrained word embeddings (Moschitti, Pang, and Daelemans 2014), and Gurobi to solve the optimisation problems. Their code is available on Github.
+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 \(k\)-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.
+What’s really interesting in the paper is the sensitivity analysis: they ran experiments with different word embeddings methods (word2vec, (Mikolov et al. 2013)), 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.
+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.
+Most importantly, this paper allows for future exploration in document representation with interpretability 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.
+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, confident that it won’t break unexpectedly without extensive testing.
Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and Their Compositionality.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26, edited by C. J. C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani, and K. Q. Weinberger, 3111–9. Curran Associates, Inc. http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5021-distributed-representations-of-words-and-phrases-and-their-compositionality.pdf.
+Moschitti, Alessandro, Bo Pang, and Walter Daelemans, eds. 2014. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2014, October 25-29, 2014, Doha, Qatar, A Meeting of Sigdat, a Special Interest Group of the ACL. ACL. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/volumes/D14-1/.
+Peyré, Gabriel, and Marco Cuturi. 2019. “Computational Optimal Transport.” Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning 11 (5-6): 355–206. https://doi.org/10.1561/2200000073.