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Posterior Sampling of Word Embeddings
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Statistics.
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology.ORCID iD: 0009-0004-4953-4123
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6028-9390
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Statistics.
(English)Manuscript (preprint) (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

We study Bayesian inference for probabilistic word embedding models, including skip-gram with negative sampling (SGNS) and continuous bag-of-words (CBoW). These models are widely used for inference, but their posteriors are non-identifiable under general linear transformations, which prevents meaningful Bayesian uncertainty quantification. We provide a simple and principled identifiability constraint that yields a well-defined posterior without altering the data model. Building on this, we develop scalable, fully Bayesian posterior sampling algorithms for SGNS and CBoW using Pólya–Gamma augmentation. Our block Gibbs samplers yield exact samples from the posterior and scale well to large corpora due to their straightforward parallelisation. We discuss the efficient implementation of the Gibbs sampler, and provide a fast TensorFlow reference implementation. In a combination of simulations and empirical experiments, we demonstrate that the sampler is both accurate and computationally efficient. It matches the accuracy of NUTS-HMC at a fraction of the computational cost and avoids the variance underestimation of mean-field variational inference. On large real datasets, we show that posterior means yield improved predictive performance, while posterior credible intervals provide meaningful uncertainty quantification for semantic similarity.

Keywords [en]
Probabilistic Modelling, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Bayesian statistics, Natural Language Processing, Gibbs sampling
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Research subject
Statistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596087DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2508.02337OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-596087DiVA, id: diva2:2093981
Available from: 2026-08-20 Created: 2026-08-20 Last updated: 2026-08-27
In thesis
1. Probabilistic Embeddings and Reliable Bayesian Inference for Textual Data
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Probabilistic Embeddings and Reliable Bayesian Inference for Textual Data
2026 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

This dissertation aims to enable the reliable Bayesian inference from text data, with the specific focus on word embedding models and data quality. The first topic is investigated through probabilistic word embedding models, with particular emphasis on identifiability, posterior uncertainty, and prior specification. Paper I introduces a new family of informative prior distributions for probabilistic word embeddings, while Paper II develops a novel Gibbs sampler and presents a solution for the non-identifiability of the embedding posterior. Furthermore, the thesis develops and analyzes methods for the creation, curation, and preprocessing of large-scale text data, which are commonly required for word embedding models. Paper III presents a general framework for this task and establishes theoretical guarantees for error reduction, and Paper IV provides a case study applying the framework to a parliamentary dataset. By addressing both model-level and data-level challenges, the thesis aims to ensure that statistical analyses of large and potentially noisy text data yield valid and trustworthy conclusions.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2026. p. 28
Series
Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Social Sciences, ISSN 1652-9030 ; 246
Keywords
Word Embeddings, Probabilistic Machine Learning, Textual Statistics, Bayesian Statistics, Data Quality
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics Natural Language Processing
Research subject
Statistics
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596091 (URN)978-91-513-2939-0 (ISBN)
Public defence
2026-10-15, Hörsal 2, Ekonomikum, Kyrkogårdsgatan 10, 753 12, Uppsala, 13:15 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2026-09-24 Created: 2026-08-27 Last updated: 2026-10-08

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Publisher's full texthttps://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02337

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Yrjänäinen, VäinöMagnusson, Måns

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Total: 7 hits
CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association
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More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
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  • Other locale
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Output format
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  • text
  • asciidoc
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