The flexibility of the inference process in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) has recently led to revising traditional probabilistic topic models giving rise to Neural Topic Models (NTM). Although these approaches have achieved significant results, sur
prisingly very little work has been done on how to disentangle the latent topics. Existing topic models when applied to reviews may extract topics associated with writers' subjective opinions mixed with those related to factual descriptions such as plot summaries in movie and book reviews. It is thus desirable to automatically separate opinion topics from plot/neutral ones enabling a better interpretability. In this paper, we propose a neural topic model combined with adversarial training to disentangle opinion topics from plot and neutral ones. We conduct an extensive experimental assessment introducing a new collection of movie and book reviews paired with their plots, namely MOBO dataset, showing an improved coherence and variety of topics, a consistent disentanglement rate, and sentiment classification performance superior to other supervised topic models.
Given a heterogeneous social network, can we forecast its future? Can we predict who will start using a given hashtag on twitter? Can we leverage side information, such as who retweets or follows whom, to improve our membership forecasts? We present
TENSORCAST, a novel method that forecasts time-evolving networks more accurately than the current state of the art methods by incorporating multiple data sources in coupled tensors. TENSORCAST is (a) scalable, being linearithmic on the number of connections; (b) effective, achieving over 20% improved precision on top-1000 forecasts of community members; (c) general, being applicable to data sources with a different structure. We run our method on multiple real-world networks, including DBLP and a Twitter temporal network with over 310 million nonzeros, where we predict the evolution of the activity of the use of political hashtags.
