Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS 2012)
Peter Krafft, Juston Moore, Bruce Desmarais, Hanna Wallach
We introduce a joint model of network content and context designed for exploratory analysis of email networks via visualization of topic-specific communication patterns. Our model is an admixture model for text and network attributes which uses multinomial distributions over words as mixture components for explaining text and latent Euclidean positions of actors as mixture components for explaining network attributes. We validate the appropriateness of our model by achieving state-of-the-art performance on a link prediction task and by achieving semantic coherence equivalent to that of latent Dirichlet allocation. We demonstrate the capability of our model for descriptive, explanatory, and exploratory analysis by investigating the inferred topic-specific communication patterns of a new government email dataset, the New Hanover County email corpus.