Venkatesh Saligrama


2019

pdf
Robust Text Classifier on Test-Time Budgets
Md Rizwan Parvez | Tolga Bolukbasi | Kai-Wei Chang | Venkatesh Saligrama
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We design a generic framework for learning a robust text classification model that achieves high accuracy under different selection budgets (a.k.a selection rates) at test-time. We take a different approach from existing methods and learn to dynamically filter a large fraction of unimportant words by a low-complexity selector such that any high-complexity state-of-art classifier only needs to process a small fraction of text, relevant for the target task. To this end, we propose a data aggregation method to train the classifier, allowing it to achieve competitive performance on fractured sentences. On four benchmark text classification tasks, we demonstrate that the framework gains consistent speedup with little degradation in accuracy on various selection budgets.