Design and investigation of capsule networks for sentence classification

Abstract

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used as an alternative to recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in text processing with promising results. In this paper, we investigated the newly introduced capsule networks (CapsNets), which are getting a lot of attention due to their great performance gains on image analysis more than CNNs, for sentence classification or sentiment analysis in some cases. The results of our experiment show that the proposed well-tuned CapsNet model can be a good, sometimes better and cheaper, substitute of models based on CNNs and RNNs used in sentence classification. In order to investigate whether CapsNets can learn the sequential order of words or not, we performed a number of experiments by reshuffling the test data. Our CapsNet model shows an overall better classification performance and better resistance to adversarial attacks than CNN and RNN models.