Text Classification through Glyph-aware Disentangled Character Embedding and Semantic Sub-character Augmentation

Takumi Aoki, Shunsuke Kitada, Hitoshi Iyatomi


Abstract
We propose a new character-based text classification framework for non-alphabetic languages, such as Chinese and Japanese. Our framework consists of a variational character encoder (VCE) and character-level text classifier. The VCE is composed of a β-variational auto-encoder (β -VAE) that learns the proposed glyph-aware disentangled character embedding (GDCE). Since our GDCE provides zero-mean unit-variance character embeddings that are dimensionally independent, it is applicable for our interpretable data augmentation, namely, semantic sub-character augmentation (SSA). In this paper, we evaluated our framework using Japanese text classification tasks at the document- and sentence-level. We confirmed that our GDCE and SSA not only provided embedding interpretability but also improved the classification performance. Our proposal achieved a competitive result to the state-of-the-art model while also providing model interpretability.
Anthology ID:
2020.aacl-srw.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Boaz Shmueli, Yin Jou Huang
Venue:
AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–7
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-srw.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Takumi Aoki, Shunsuke Kitada, and Hitoshi Iyatomi. 2020. Text Classification through Glyph-aware Disentangled Character Embedding and Semantic Sub-character Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 1–7, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text Classification through Glyph-aware Disentangled Character Embedding and Semantic Sub-character Augmentation (Aoki et al., AACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.aacl-srw.1.pdf
Code
 IyatomiLab/GDCE-SSA