Algorithms (Jul 2022)
Short Text Classification with Tolerance-Based Soft Computing Method
Abstract
Text classification aims to assign labels to textual units such as documents, sentences and paragraphs. Some applications of text classification include sentiment classification and news categorization. In this paper, we present a soft computing technique-based algorithm (TSC) to classify sentiment polarities of tweets as well as news categories from text. The TSC algorithm is a supervised learning method based on tolerance near sets. Near sets theory is a more recent soft computing methodology inspired by rough sets where instead of set approximation operators used by rough sets to induce tolerance classes, the tolerance classes are directly induced from the feature vectors using a tolerance level parameter and a distance function. The proposed TSC algorithm takes advantage of the recent advances in efficient feature extraction and vector generation from pre-trained bidirectional transformer encoders for creating tolerance classes. Experiments were performed on ten well-researched datasets which include both short and long text. Both pre-trained SBERT and TF-IDF vectors were used in the experimental analysis. Results from transformer-based vectors demonstrate that TSC outperforms five well-known machine learning algorithms on four datasets, and it is comparable with all other datasets based on the weighted F1, Precision and Recall scores. The highest AUC-ROC (Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics) score was obtained in two datasets and comparable in six other datasets. The highest ROC-PRC (Area under the Precision–Recall Curve) score was obtained in one dataset and comparable in four other datasets. Additionally, significant differences were observed in most comparisons when examining the statistical difference between the weighted F1-score of TSC and other classifiers using a Wilcoxon signed-ranks test.
Keywords
