Topic learning from few examples

Abstract

This paper describes a semi-supervised algorithm for single class learning with very few examples. The problem is formulated as a hierarchical latent variable model which is clipped to ignore classes not of interest. The model is trained using a multistage EM (msEM) algorithm. The msEM algorithm maximizes the likelihood of the joint distribution of the data and latent variables, under the constraint that the distribution of each layer is fixed in successive stages. We demonstrate that with very few positive examples, the algorithm performs better than training all layers in a single stage. We also show that the latter is equivalent to training a single layer model with corresponding parameters. The performance of the algorithm was verified on several real-world information extraction tasks.