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Probabilistic Embeddings and Reliable Bayesian Inference for Textual Data
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Statistics.
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 [en]
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: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596091ISBN: 978-91-513-2939-0 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-596091DiVA, id: diva2:2095998
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
List of papers
1. Probabilistic Embeddings with Laplacian Graph Priors
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Probabilistic Embeddings with Laplacian Graph Priors
(English)Manuscript (preprint) (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Word embeddings have become an increasingly important class of models for analysis of textual data. We introduce probabilistic embeddings using Laplacian graph priors (PELP). The proposed model enables incorporating graph side-information into static word embeddings. We theoretically show that the model unifies several previously proposed embedding methods under one umbrella, such as graph-enhanced, group, dynamic, and cross-lingual static word embeddings.  Furthermore, we empirically show that our model matches or improves the performance of previous models that are special cases of the PELP model. PELP also enables any combination of these previous models in a  straightforward fashion for flexible modeling of textual data in a Bayesian fashion. We demonstrate the flexibility of using the graph-prior for embeddings by applying it to the comparison of political sociolects over time. Finally, we provide code as a TensorFlow implementation, enabling flexible and scalable estimation for settings with millions of documents.

Keywords
Word Embeddings, Probabilistic Language Models, Graph Priors
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Research subject
Statistics
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596086 (URN)10.48550/arXiv.2204.01846 (DOI)
Available from: 2026-08-20 Created: 2026-08-20 Last updated: 2026-08-27
2. Posterior Sampling of Word Embeddings
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Posterior Sampling of Word Embeddings
(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
Probabilistic Modelling, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Bayesian statistics, Natural Language Processing, Gibbs sampling
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Research subject
Statistics
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596087 (URN)10.48550/arXiv.2508.02337 (DOI)
Available from: 2026-08-20 Created: 2026-08-20 Last updated: 2026-08-27
3. Iterative Data Curation with Theoretical Guarantees
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Iterative Data Curation with Theoretical Guarantees
(English)In: Journal of Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR)Article in journal (Refereed) Submitted
Abstract [en]

Data accuracy is crucial for reliable research, accurate decision-making, and high-performance machine learning.However, maintaining and improving data accuracy, especially at scale, is challenging and difficult to verify. By combining statistical quality control and branching process theory, we formalize an iterative data curation framework that scales well to large data sets. The framework is agnostic to the source and reliability of proposed data edits, allowing human annotators, automated rules, machine learning models, large language models, and external data sources to be combined within a common statistical process. We prove that under mild assumptions, the proposed iterative approach asymptotically eliminates all errors with probability one for both tabular and textual data.Additionally, we provide guarantees that data accuracy testing further accelerates error reduction. We corroborate these results through simulations on text and tabular data, as well as a real-world application, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in improving the accuracy of data at scale.

Keywords
data accuracy, iterative data curation, data quality, statistical quality assurance
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Research subject
Statistics
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596089 (URN)
Available from: 2026-08-20 Created: 2026-08-20 Last updated: 2026-08-27
4. The Swedish parliament corpus 1867–2022
Open this publication in new window or tab >>The Swedish parliament corpus 1867–2022
Show others...
2024 (English)In: Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) / [ed] Nicoletta Calzolari; Min-Yen Kan; Veronique Hoste; Alessandro Lenci; Sakriani Sakti; Nianwen Xue, European Language Resources Association, 2024, p. 16100-16112Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The Swedish parliamentary records are an important source material for social science and humanities researchers. We introduce a new research corpus, the Swedish Parliament Corpus, which is larger and more developed than previously available research corpora for the Swedish parliament. The corpus contains annotated and structured parliamentary records over more than 150 years, through the bicameral parliament (1867–1970) and the unicameral parliament (1971–). In addition to the records, which contain all speeches in the parliament, we also provide a database of all members of parliament over the same period. Along with the corpus, we describe procedures to ensure data quality. The corpus facilitates detailed analysis of parliamentary speeches in several research fields.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
European Language Resources Association, 2024
Series
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, ISSN 2951-2093
Keywords
parliamentary data, Sweden, political debate, language resource, politics, data curation
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-548701 (URN)001612977900623 ()978-2-493814-10-4 (ISBN)
Conference
2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), 20-25 May, 2024, Torino, Italy
Available from: 2025-01-28 Created: 2025-01-28 Last updated: 2026-08-27Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf