Textual Data Distributions: Kullback Leibler Textual Distributions Contrasts on GPT-2 Generated Texts, with Supervised, Unsupervised Learning on Vaccine & Market Topics & Sentiment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method called KL-TDC for analyzing and validating the alignment of textual data distributions, especially in generated texts, using supervised, unsupervised learning, and GPT-2, to improve NLP applications involving topic and sentiment matching.

Contribution

It presents a new approach combining machine learning and a modified Kullback-Leibler divergence to assess the similarity between natural and machine-generated textual data distributions.

Findings

KL-TDC effectively measures alignment of generated and natural texts.

GPT-2 can produce topic and sentiment aligned texts.

Method aids in addressing data sparsity in NLP applications.

Abstract

Efficient textual data distributions (TDD) alignment and generation are open research problems in textual analytics and NLP. It is presently difficult to parsimoniously and methodologically confirm that two or more natural language datasets belong to similar distributions, and to identify the extent to which textual data possess alignment. This study focuses on addressing a segment of the broader problem described above by applying multiple supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) methods to explore the behavior of TDD by (i) topical alignment, and (ii) by sentiment alignment. Furthermore we use multiple text generation methods including fine-tuned GPT-2, to generate text by topic and by sentiment. Finally we develop a unique process driven variation of Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) application to TDD, named KL Textual Distributions Contrasts(KL-TDC) to identify the alignment of machine generated textual corpora with naturally occurring textual corpora. This study thus identifies a unique approach for generating and validating TDD by topic and sentiment, which can be used to help address sparse data problems and other research, practice and classroom situations in need of artificially generated topic or sentiment aligned textual data.