What are some applications of Chinese restaurant processes?

Question

What are some applications of Chinese restaurant processes?

I'm trying to learn a bit about non-parametric Bayesian methods, starting with Dirichlet processes and CRPs, but all the tutorials I've found are about theory, without describing any applications in depth.

Names of papers would be great. I'm not really looking for state-of-the-art applications, but just some "canonical" examples (say, in natural language processing) of why Dirichlet processes and Chinese restaurant processes are useful and why I should care.

Answer 1

Here are some important papers that have applied nonparametric Bayes to topic modeling for example:

• Blei et al., Hierarchical Topic Models and the Nested Chinese Restaurant Process, NIPS 2003.

• Teh et al., Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes, JASA 2006.

You can find tons of other papers at aclweb.org.

Answer 2

Kevin Knight's Bayesian Inference With Tears describes applications of the Chinese Restaurant Process (which he calls a "cache model") to tree substitution grammars, Chinese word segmentation, and part-of-speech tagging.

(If anyone knows the original sources for these applications, that'd be great as well.)