Implementing alternative forms of LDA
My friend's response is below, pardon the language please.

First I wrote up a Python implementation of the collapsed Gibbs sampler seen here (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/suppl.1/5228.full.pdf+html) and fleshed out here (http://cxwangyi.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/llt.pdf). This was slow as balls.
Then I used a Python wrapping of a C implementation of this paper (http://books.nips.cc/papers/files/nips19/NIPS2006_0511.pdf). Which is fast as f*ck, but the results are not as great as one would see with NMF. 
But NMF implementations I've seen, with scitkits, and even with the scipy sparse-compatible recently released NIMFA library, they all blow the f*ck up on any sizable corpus. My new white whale is a sliced, distributed implementation of the thing. This'll be non-trivial.
I am using Latent Dirichlet Allocation with a corpus of news data from six different sources. I am interested in topic evolution, emergence, and want to compare how the sources are alike and different from each other over time. I know that there are a number of modified LDA algorithms such as the Author-Topic model, Topics Over Time, and so on.
My issue is that very few of these alternate model specifications are implemented in any standard format. A few are available in Java, but most exist as conference papers only. What is the best way to go about implementing some of these algorithms on my own? I am fairly proficient in R and jags, and can stumble around in Python when given long enough. I am willing to write the code, but I don't really know where to start and I don't know C or Java. Can I build a model in JAGS or Python just having the formulas from the manuscript? If so, can someone point me at an example of doing this? Thanks.