It is evident that deep text classification models trained on human data could be biased. In particular, they produce biased outcomes for texts that explicitly include identity terms of certain demographic groups. We refer to this type of bias as explicit bias, which has been extensively studied. However, deep text classification models can also produce biased outcomes for texts written by authors of certain demographic groups. We refer to such bias as implicit bias of which we still have a rather limited understanding. In this paper, we first demonstrate that implicit bias exists in different text classification tasks for different demographic groups. Then, we build a learning-based interpretation method to deepen our knowledge of implicit bias. Specifically, we verify that classifiers learn to make predictions based on language features that are related to the demographic attributes of the authors. Next, we propose a framework Debiased-TC to train deep text classifiers to make predictions on the right features and consequently mitigate implicit bias. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The results show that the text classification models trained under our proposed framework outperform traditional models significantly in terms of fairness, and also slightly in terms of classification performance.
Companies regularly spend millions of dollars producing electronically-stored documents in legal matters. Recently, parties on both sides of the 'legal aisle' are accepting the use of machine learning techniques like text classification to cull massive volumes of data and to identify responsive documents for use in these matters. While text classification is regularly used to reduce the discovery costs in legal matters, it also faces a peculiar perception challenge: amongst lawyers, this technology is sometimes looked upon as a "black box", little information provided for attorneys to understand why documents are classified as responsive. In recent years, a group of AI and ML researchers have been actively researching Explainable AI, in which actions or decisions are human understandable. In legal document review scenarios, a document can be identified as responsive, if one or more of its text snippets are deemed responsive. In these scenarios, if text classification can be used to locate these snippets, then attorneys could easily evaluate the model's classification decision. When deployed with defined and explainable results, text classification can drastically enhance overall quality and speed of the review process by reducing the review time. Moreover, explainable predictive coding provides lawyers with greater confidence in the results of that supervised learning task. This paper describes a framework for explainable text classification as a valuable tool in legal services: for enhancing the quality and efficiency of legal document review and for assisting in locating responsive snippets within responsive documents. This framework has been implemented in our legal analytics product, which has been used in hundreds of legal matters. We also report our experimental results using the data from an actual legal matter that used this type of document review.
Text representation is a fundamental concern in Natural Language Processing, especially in text classification. Recently, many neural network approaches with delicate representation model (e.g. FASTTEXT, CNN, RNN and many hybrid models with attention mechanisms) claimed that they achieved state-of-art in specific text classification datasets. However, it lacks an unified benchmark to compare these models and reveals the advantage of each sub-components for various settings. We re-implement more than 20 popular text representation models for classification in more than 10 datasets. In this paper, we reconsider the text classification task in the perspective of neural network and get serval effects with analysis of the above results.
The extraction of text information in videos serves as a critical step towards semantic understanding of videos. It usually involved in two steps: (1) text recognition and (2) text classification. To localize texts in videos, we can resort to large numbers of text recognition methods based on OCR technology. However, to our knowledge, there is no existing work focused on the second step of video text classification, which will limit the guidance to downstream tasks such as video indexing and browsing. In this paper, we are the first to address this new task of video text classification by fusing multimodal information to deal with the challenging scenario where different types of video texts may be confused with various colors, unknown fonts and complex layouts. In addition, we tailor a specific module called CorrelationNet to reinforce feature representation by explicitly extracting layout information. Furthermore, contrastive learning is utilized to explore inherent connections between samples using plentiful unlabeled videos. Finally, we construct a new well-defined industrial dataset from the news domain, called TI-News, which is dedicated to building and evaluating video text recognition and classification applications. Extensive experiments on TI-News demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
As the amount of online text increases, the demand for text classification to aid the analysis and management of text is increasing. Text is cheap, but information, in the form of knowing what classes a text belongs to, is expensive. Automatic classification of text can provide this information at low cost, but the classifiers themselves must be built with expensive human effort, or trained from texts which have themselves been manually classified. In this paper we will discuss a procedure of classifying text using the concept of association rule of data mining. Association rule mining technique has been used to derive feature set from pre-classified text documents. Naive Bayes classifier is then used on derived features for final classification.
Text classification is a widely studied problem, and it can be considered solved for some domains and under certain circumstances. There are scenarios, however, that have received little or no attention at all, despite its relevance and applicability. One of such scenarios is early text classification, where one needs to know the category of a document by using partial information only. A document is processed as a sequence of terms, and the goal is to devise a method that can make predictions as fast as possible. The importance of this variant of the text classification problem is evident in domains like sexual predator detection, where one wants to identify an offender as early as possible. This paper analyzes the suitability of the standard naive Bayes classifier for approaching this problem. Specifically, we assess its performance when classifying documents after seeing an increasingly number of terms. A simple modification to the standard naive Bayes implementation allows us to make predictions with partial information. To the best of our knowledge naive Bayes has not been used for this purpose before. Throughout an extensive experimental evaluation we show the effectiveness of the classifier for early text classification. What is more, we show that this simple solution is very competitive when compared with state of the art methodologies that are more elaborated. We foresee our work will pave the way for the development of more effective early text classification techniques based in the naive Bayes formulation.
Deep neural networks are gaining increasing popularity for the classic text classification task, due to their strong expressive power and less requirement for feature engineering. Despite such attractiveness, neural text classification models suffer from the lack of training data in many real-world applications. Although many semi-supervised and weakly-supervised text classification models exist, they cannot be easily applied to deep neural models and meanwhile support limited supervision types. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised method that addresses the lack of training data in neural text classification. Our method consists of two modules: (1) a pseudo-document generator that leverages seed information to generate pseudo-labeled documents for model pre-training, and (2) a self-training module that bootstraps on real unlabeled data for model refinement. Our method has the flexibility to handle different types of weak supervision and can be easily integrated into existing deep neural models for text classification. We have performed extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves inspiring performance without requiring excessive training data and outperforms baseline methods significantly.
We introduce a novel method for converting text data into abstract image representations, which allows image-based processing techniques (e.g. image classification networks) to be applied to text-based comparison problems. We apply the technique to entity disambiguation of inventor names in US patents. The method involves converting text from each pairwise comparison between two inventor name records into a 2D RGB (stacked) image representation. We then train an image classification neural network to discriminate between such pairwise comparison images, and use the trained network to label each pair of records as either matched (same inventor) or non-matched (different inventors), obtaining highly accurate results (F1: 99.09%, precision: 99.41%, recall: 98.76%). Our new text-to-image representation method could potentially be used more broadly for other NLP comparison problems, such as disambiguation of academic publications, or for problems that require simultaneous classification of both text and images.
Neural text classification methods typically treat output classes as categorical labels which lack description and semantics. This leads to an inability to train them well on large label sets or to generalize to unseen labels and makes speed and parameterization dependent on the size of the label set. Joint input-label space methods ameliorate the above issues by exploiting label texts or descriptions, but often at the expense of weak performance on the labels seen frequently during training. In this paper, we propose a label-aware text classification model which addresses these issues without compromising performance on the seen labels. The model consists of a joint input-label multiplicative space and a label-set-size independent classification unit and is trained with cross-entropy loss to optimize accuracy. We evaluate our model on text classification for multilingual news and for biomedical text with a large label set. The label-aware model consistently outperforms both monolingual and multilingual classification models which do not leverage label semantics and previous joint input-label space models.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on cost-sensitive ensemble weighted extreme learning machine; we call this approach AE1-WELM. We apply this approach to text classification. AE1-WELM is an algorithm including balanced and imbalanced multiclassification for text classification. Weighted ELM assigning the different weights to the different samples improves the classification accuracy to a certain extent, but weighted ELM considers the differences between samples in the different categories only and ignores the differences between samples within the same categories. We measure the importance of the documents by the sample information entropy, and generate cost-sensitive matrix and factor based on the document importance, then embed the cost-sensitive weighted ELM into the AdaBoost.M1 framework seamlessly. Vector space model(VSM) text representation produces the high dimensions and sparse features which increase the burden of ELM. To overcome this problem, we develop a text classification framework combining the word vector and AE1-WELM. The experimental results show that our method provides an accurate, reliable and effective solution for text classification.
Add to Chrome
Add to Firefox