Rethinking Complex Neural Network Architectures for Document Classification

Ashutosh Adhikari, Achyudh Ram, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin


Abstract
Neural network models for many NLP tasks have grown increasingly complex in recent years, making training and deployment more difficult. A number of recent papers have questioned the necessity of such architectures and found that well-executed, simpler models are quite effective. We show that this is also the case for document classification: in a large-scale reproducibility study of several recent neural models, we find that a simple BiLSTM architecture with appropriate regularization yields accuracy and F1 that are either competitive or exceed the state of the art on four standard benchmark datasets. Surprisingly, our simple model is able to achieve these results without attention mechanisms. While these regularization techniques, borrowed from language modeling, are not novel, to our knowledge we are the first to apply them in this context. Our work provides an open-source platform and the foundation for future work in document classification.
Anthology ID:
N19-1408
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4046–4051
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ashutosh Adhikari, Achyudh Ram, Raphael Tang, and Jimmy Lin. 2019. Rethinking Complex Neural Network Architectures for Document Classification. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 4046–4051, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rethinking Complex Neural Network Architectures for Document Classification (Adhikari et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1408.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/359714536
Data
IMDB-MULTIReuters-21578Yelp