Evaluation and comparison of word embedding models, for efficient text classification Ilias Koutsakis George Tsatsaronis Evangelos Kanoulas University of Amsterdam Elsevier University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract soon. On the contrary, even non-traditional businesses, like 1 Recent research on word embeddings has shown that they banks , start using Natural Language Processing for R&D tend to outperform distributional models, on word similarity and HR purposes. It is no wonder then, that industries try to and analogy detection tasks. However, there is not enough take advantage of new methodologies, to create state of the information on whether or not such embeddings can im- art products, in order to cover their needs and stay ahead of prove text classification of longer pieces of text, e.g. articles. the curve. More specifically, it is not clear yet whether or not theusage This is how the concept of word embeddings became pop- of word embeddings has significant effect on various text ular again in the last few years, especially after the work of classifiers, and what is the performance of word embeddings Mikolov et al [14], that showed that shallow neural networks after being trained in different amounts of dimensions (not can provide word vectors with some amazing geometrical only the standard size = 300). properties. The central idea is that words can be mapped to In this research, we determine that the use of word em- fixed-size vectors of real numbers. Those vectors, should be beddings can create feature vectors that not only provide able to hold semantic context, and this is why they were a formidable baseline, but also outperform traditional, very successful in sentiment analysis, word disambiguation count-based methods (bag of words, tf-idf) for the same and syntactic parsing tasks.