TextConvoNet: a convolutional neural network based architecture for text classification

Abstract

This paper presents, TextConvoNet, a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture for binary and multi-class text classification problems. Most of the existing CNN-based models use one-dimensional convolving filters, where each filter specializes in extracting n-grams features of a particular input word embeddings (Sentence Matrix). These features can be termed as intra-sentence n-gram features. To the best of our knowledge, all the existing CNN models for text classification are based on the aforementioned concept. The presented TextConvoNet not only extracts the intra-sentence n-gram features but also captures the inter-sentence n-gram features in input text data. It uses an alternative approach for input matrix representation and applies a two-dimensional multi-scale convolutional operation on the input. We perform an experimental study on five binary and multi-class classification datasets and evaluate the performance of the TextConvoNet for text classification. The results are evaluated using eight performance measures, accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, specificity, gmean1, gmean2, and Mathews correlation coefficient (MCC). Furthermore, we extensively compared presented TextConvoNet with machine learning, deep learning, and attention-based models. The experimental results evidenced that the presented TextConvoNet outperformed and yielded better performance than the other used models for text classification purposes.