Scaling the iHMM: Parallelization versus Hadoop

—This paper compares parallel and distributed implementations of an iterative, Gibbs sampling, machine learning algorithm. Distributed implementations run under Hadoop on facility computing clouds. The probabilistic model under study is the infinite HMM [1], in which parameters are learnt using an instance blocked Gibbs sampling, with a step consisting of a dynamic program. We apply this model to learn part-of-speech tags from newswire text in an unsupervised fashion. However our focus here is on runtime performance, as opposed to NLP-relevant scores, embodied by iteration duration, ease of development, deployment and debugging.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IEEECIT
• Authors: Sebastien Bratieres, Jurgen Van Gael, Andreas Vlachos, Zoubin Ghahramani
• Keywords: Facility Computing Clouds, IEEECIT 2010, Information Technology, Infinite Hmm, Iteration Duration