Federated Topic Modeling

Topic modeling has been widely applied in a variety of industrial applications. Training a high-quality model usually requires massive amount of in-domain data, in order to provide comprehensive co-occurrence information for the model to learn. However, industrial data such as medical or financial records are often proprietary or sensitive, which precludes uploading to data centers. Hence training topic models in industrial scenarios using conventional approaches faces a dilemma: a party (i.e., a company or institute) has to either tolerate data scarcity or sacrifice data privacy. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Federated Topic Modeling (FTM), in which multiple parties collaboratively train a high-quality topic model by simultaneously alleviating data scarcity and maintaining immune to privacy adversaries. FTM is inspired by federated learning and consists of novel techniques such as private Metropolis Hastings, topic-wise normalization and heterogeneous model integration. We conduct a series of quantitative evaluations to verify the effectiveness of FTM and deploy FTM in an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to demonstrate its utility in real-life applications. Experimental results verify FTM's superiority over conventional topic modeling. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.