Approximate Kalman Filters for Embedding Author-Word Co-occurrence Data over Time

Abstract

We address the problem of embedding entities into Euclidean space over time based on co-occurrence data. We extend the CODE model of [1] to a dynamic setting. This leads to a non-standard factored state space model with real-valued hidden parent nodes and discrete observation nodes. We investigate the use of variational approximations applied to the observation model that allow us to formulate the entire dynamic model as a Kalman filter. Applying this model to temporal co-occurrence data yields posterior distributions of entity coordinates in Euclidean space that are updated over time. Initial results on per-year co-occurrences of authors and words in the NIPS corpus and on synthetic data, including videos of dynamic embeddings, seem to indicate that the model results in embeddings of co-occurrence data that are meaningful both temporally and contextually.