Text classification is a fundamental problem, and recently, deep neural networks (DNN) have shown promising results in many natural language tasks. However, their human-level performance relies on high-quality annotations, which are time-consuming and expensive to collect. As we move towards large inexpensive datasets, the inherent label noise degrades the generalization of DNN. While most machine learning literature focuses on building complex networks to handle noise, in this work, we evaluate model-agnostic methods to handle inherent noise in large scale text classification that can be easily incorporated into existing machine learning workflows with minimal interruption. Specifically, we conduct a point-by-point comparative study between several noise-robust methods on three datasets encompassing three popular classification models. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a comprehensive study in text classification encircling popular models and model-agnostic loss methods has been conducted. In this study, we describe our learning and demonstrate the application of our approach, which outperformed baselines by up to 10 % in classification accuracy while requiring no network modifications.

Short text classification is a fundamental problem in natural language processing, social network analysis, and e-commerce. The lack of structure in short text sequences limits the success of popular NLP methods based on deep learning. Simpler methods that rely on bag-of-words representations tend to perform on par with complex deep learning methods. To tackle the limitations of textual features in short text, we propose a Graph-regularized Graph Convolution Network (GR-GCN), which augments graph convolution networks by incorporating label dependencies in the output space. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on both proprietary and external datasets, outperforming several baseline methods by up to 6% . Furthermore, we show that compared to baseline methods, GR-GCN is more robust to noise in textual features.