Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA)

From
Jump to: navigation, search

Youtube search... ...Google search


PLSA is a probabilistic generative model used for topic modeling in text data. It is an extension of Latent Semantic Analysis that introduces a probabilistic framework to the topic modeling problem.

  • How PLSA Works: In PLSA, it is assumed that documents are generated through a probabilistic process. Specifically, it assumes that there are latent topics, and each document is a mixture of these topics. Each word in a document is generated from one of these topics with a certain probability.
  • Applications: PLSA is mainly used for discovering topics in large document collections. By analyzing the word-topic and topic-document distributions learned by PLSA, you can identify the prevalent themes or topics within the corpus.

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)

LSA is a technique used for dimensionality reduction and discovering the underlying structure in a collection of documents. It's primarily used for tasks like document clustering, information retrieval, and document summarization.

  • How LSA Works: LSA operates by performing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on a term-document matrix. This matrix represents the frequency of terms (words) in documents. SVD reduces the dimensionality of this matrix and extracts latent semantic patterns. The resulting lower-dimensional representations can help identify relationships between words and documents.
  • Applications: LSA can be used for clustering similar documents, finding related documents in information retrieval, and generating document summaries by identifying key terms and phrases.

Key Differences: LSA & PLSA

  • LSA is primarily focused on dimensionality reduction and finding semantic patterns in documents, whereas PLSA is a generative probabilistic model designed specifically for topic modeling.
  • LSA does not involve a probabilistic generative process, while PLSA explicitly models the probability of word generation from topics.
  • In PLSA, the number of topics is typically a parameter to be determined, whereas LSA does not inherently model topics.