Tamara G. Kolda

A semidiscrete matrix decomposition for latent semantic indexing information retrieval

The vast amount of textual information available today is useless unless it can be effectively and efficiently searched. The goal in information retrieval is to find documents that are relevant to a given user query. We can represent and document collection by a matrix whose (i, j) entry is nonzero only if the ith term appears in the jth document; thus each document corresponds to a columm vector. The query is also represented as a column vector whose ith term is nonzero only if the ith term appears in the query. We score each document for relevancy by taking its inner product with the query. The highest-scoring documents are considered the most relevant. Unfortunately, this method does not necessarily retrieve all relevant documents because it is based on literal term matching. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) replaces the document matrix with an approximation generated by the truncated singular-value decomposition (SVD). This method has been shown to overcome many difficulties associated with literal term matching. In this article we propose replacing the SVD with the semidiscrete decomposition (SDD). We will describe the SDD approximation, show how to compute it, and compare the SDD-based LSI method to the SVD-based LSI methods. We will show that SDD-based LSI does as well as SVD-based LSI in terms of document retrieval while requiring only one-twentieth the storage and one-half the time to compute each query. We will also show how to update the SDD approximation when documents are added or deleted from the document collection.

BFGS with update skipping and varying memory

We give conditions under which limited-memory quasi-Newton methods with exact line searches will terminate in n steps when minimizing n-dimensional quadratic functions. We show that although all Broyden family methods terminate in n steps in their full-memory versions, only BFGS does so with limited-memory. Additionally, we show that full-memory Broyden family methods with exact line searches terminate in at most n + p steps when p matrix updates are skipped. We introduce new limited-memory BFGS variants and test them on nonquadratic minimization problems.

Partitioning sparse rectangular matrices for parallel processing

The authors are interested in partitioning sparse rectangular matrices for parallel processing. The partitioning problem has been well-studied in the square symmetric case, but the rectangular problem has received very little attention. They will formalize the rectangular matrix partitioning problem and discuss several methods for solving it. They will extend the spectral partitioning method for symmetric matrices to the rectangular case and compare this method to three new methods -- the alternating partitioning method and two hybrid methods. The hybrid methods will be shown to be best.

Partitioning Sparse Rectangular Matrices for Parallel Computations of Ax and ATv

This paper addresses the problem of partitioning the nonzeros of sparse nonsymmetric and nonsquare matrices in order to efficiently compute parallel matrix-vector and matrix-transpose-vector multiplies. Our goal is to balance the work per processor while keeping communications costs low. Although the symmetric partitioning problem has been well-studied, the nonsymmetric and rectangular cases have received scant attention. We show that this problem can be described as a partitioning problem on a bipartite graph. We then describe how to use (modified) multilevel methods to partition these graphs and how to implement the matrix multiplies in parallel to take advantage of the partitioning. Finally, we compare various multilevel and other partitioning strategies on matrices from different applications. The multilevel methods are shown to be best.

Workshop on Women of Applied Mathematics: Research and Leadership

We held a two and a half day workshop on Women of Applied Mathematics: Research and Leadership at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, October 8--10, 2003. The workshop provided a technical and professional forum for eleven senior women and twenty-four early-career women in applied mathematics. Each participant committed to an outreach activity and publication of a report on the workshops web site. The final session of the workshop produced recommendations for future action.