Text classification is a fundamental task in NLP applications. Latest research in this field has largely been divided into two major sub-fields. Learning representations is one sub-field and learning deeper models, both sequential and convolutional, which again connects back to the representation is the other side. We posit the idea that the stronger the representation is, the simpler classifier models are needed to achieve higher performance. In this paper we propose a completely novel direction to text classification research, wherein we convert text to a representation very similar to images, such that any deep network able to handle images is equally able to handle text. We take a deeper look at the representation of documents as an image and subsequently utilize very simple convolution based models taken as is from computer vision domain. This image can be cropped, re-scaled, re-sampled and augmented just like any other image to work with most of the state-of-the-art large convolution based models which have been designed to handle large image datasets. We show impressive results with some of the latest benchmarks in the related fields. We perform transfer learning experiments, both from text to text domain and also from image to text domain. We believe this is a paradigm shift from the way document understanding and text classification has been traditionally done, and will drive numerous novel research ideas in the community.
Another work which closely follows the ideas we discuss in this work is the neural attention based sentence summarization work by @cite_23 . They propose an attention framework to identify the abstractive summary for a given text block. The cost function is an NLM model with the input pair encoding being done by a simple attention mechanism. Again the simple attention mechanism comes close to the our work, but the NLM model makes the representation highly task specific.
@cite_23
2612675303 2952913664 2781548983 2754586843
Attentional, RNN-based encoder-decoder models for abstractive summarization have achieved good performance on short input and output sequences. For longer documents and summaries however these models often include repetitive and incoherent phrases. We introduce a neural network model with a novel intra-attention that attends over the input and continuously generated output separately, and a new training method that combines standard supervised word prediction and reinforcement learning (RL). Models trained only with supervised learning often exhibit "exposure bias" - they assume ground truth is provided at each step during training. However, when standard word prediction is combined with the global sequence prediction training of RL the resulting summaries become more readable. We evaluate this model on the CNN Daily Mail and New York Times datasets. Our model obtains a 41.16 ROUGE-1 score on the CNN Daily Mail dataset, an improvement over previous state-of-the-art models. Human evaluation also shows that our model produces higher quality summaries. Neural sequence-to-sequence models have provided a viable new approach for abstractive text summarization (meaning they are not restricted to simply selecting and rearranging passages from the original text). However, these models have two shortcomings: they are liable to reproduce factual details inaccurately, and they tend to repeat themselves. In this work we propose a novel architecture that augments the standard sequence-to-sequence attentional model in two orthogonal ways. First, we use a hybrid pointer-generator network that can copy words from the source text via pointing, which aids accurate reproduction of information, while retaining the ability to produce novel words through the generator. Second, we use coverage to keep track of what has been summarized, which discourages repetition. We apply our model to the CNN Daily Mail summarization task, outperforming the current abstractive state-of-the-art by at least 2 ROUGE points. Neural network models with attention mechanism have shown their efficiencies on various tasks. However, there is little research work on attention mechanism for text classification and existing attention model for text classification lacks of cognitive intuition and mathematical explanation. In this paper, we propose a new architecture of neural network based on the attention model for text classification. In particular, we show that the convolutional neural network (CNN) is a reasonable model for extracting attentions from text sequences in mathematics. We then propose a novel attention model base on CNN and introduce a new network architecture which combines recurrent neural network with our CNN-based attention model. Experimental results on five datasets show that our proposed models can accurately capture the salient parts of sentences to improve the performance of text classification. Recurrent neural nets (RNN) and convolutional neural nets (CNN) are widely used on NLP tasks to capture the long-term and local dependencies, respectively. Attention mechanisms have recently attracted enormous interest due to their highly parallelizable computation, significantly less training time, and flexibility in modeling dependencies. We propose a novel attention mechanism in which the attention between elements from input sequence(s) is directional and multi-dimensional (i.e., feature-wise). A light-weight neural net, "Directional Self-Attention Network (DiSAN)", is then proposed to learn sentence embedding, based solely on the proposed attention without any RNN CNN structure. DiSAN is only composed of a directional self-attention with temporal order encoded, followed by a multi-dimensional attention that compresses the sequence into a vector representation. Despite its simple form, DiSAN outperforms complicated RNN models on both prediction quality and time efficiency. It achieves the best test accuracy among all sentence encoding methods and improves the most recent best result by 1.02 on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, and shows state-of-the-art test accuracy on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST), Multi-Genre natural language inference (MultiNLI), Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK), Customer Review, MPQA, TREC question-type classification and Subjectivity (SUBJ) datasets.