Word-Level and Pinyin-Level Based Chinese Short Text Classification

Abstract

Short text classification is an important branch of Natural Language Processing. Although CNN and RNN have achieved satisfactory results in the text classification tasks, they are difficult to apply to the Chinese short text classification because of the data sparsity and the homophonic typos problems of them. To solve the above problems, word-level and Pinyin-level based Chinese short text classification model is constructed. Since homophones have the same Pinyin, the addition of Pinyin-level features can solve the homophonic typos problem. In addition, due to the introduction of more features, the data sparsity problem of short text can be solved. In order to fully extract the deep hidden features of the short text, a deep learning model based on BiLSTM, Attention and CNN is constructed, and the residual network is used to solve the gradient disappearance problem with the increase of network layers. Additionally, considering that the complex deep learning network structure will increase the text classification time, the Text Center is constructed. When there is a new text input, the text classification task can be quickly realized by calculating the Manhattan distance between the embedding vector of it and the vectors stored in the Text Center. The Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1 of the proposed model on the simplifyweibo_4_moods dataset are 0.9713, 0.9627, 0.9765 and 0.9696 respectively, and those on the online_shopping_10_cats dataset are 0.9533, 0.9416, 0.9608 and 0.9511 respectively, which are better than that of the baseline method. In addition, the classification time of the proposed model on simplifyweibo_4_moods and online_shopping_10_cats is 0.0042 and 0.0033 respectively, which is far lower than that of the baseline method.

Keywords

• Short text classification
• data sparsity
• homophonic typos problem
• word-level
• Pinyin-level
• text center