Text Classification Experiments on Contextual Graphs Built by N-Gram Series

Abstract

Traditional n-gram textual features, commonly employed in conventional machine learning models, offer lower performance rates on high-volume datasets compared to modern deep learning algorithms, which have been intensively studied for the past decade. The main reason for this performance disparity is that deep learning approaches handle textual data through the word vector space representation by catching the contextually hidden information in a better way. Nonetheless, the potential of the n-gram feature set to reflect the context is open to further investigation. In this sense, creating graphs using discriminative ngram series with high classification power has never been fully exploited by researchers. Hence, the main goal of this study is to contribute to the classification power by including the long-range neighborhood relationships for each word in the word embedding representations. To achieve this goal, we transformed the textual data by employing n-gram series into a graph structure and then trained a graph convolution network model. Consequently, we obtained contextually enriched word embeddings and observed F1-score performance improvements from 0.78 to 0.80 when we integrated those convolution-based word embeddings into an LSTM model. This research contributes to improving classification capabilities by leveraging graph structures derived from discriminative n-gram series.