ClassiNet -- Predicting Missing Features for Short-Text Classification

The fundamental problem in short-text classification is feature sparseness -- the lack of feature overlap between a trained model and a test instance to be classified. We propose ClassiNet -- a network of classifiers trained for predicting missing features in a given instance, to overcome the feature sparseness problem. Using a set of unlabeled training instances, we first learn binary classifiers as feature predictors for predicting whether a particular feature occurs in a given instance. Next, each feature predictor is represented as a vertex vi in the ClassiNet where a one-to-one correspondence exists between feature predictors and vertices. The weight of the directed edge eij connecting a vertex vi to a vertex vj represents the conditional probability that given vi exists in an instance, vj also exists in the same instance. We show that ClassiNets generalize word co-occurrence graphs by considering implicit co-occurrences between features. We extract numerous features from the trained ClassiNet to overcome feature sparseness. In particular, for a given instance vecx, we find similar features from ClassiNet that did not appear in vecx, and append those features in the representation of vecx. Moreover, we propose a method based on graph propagation to find features that are indirectly related to a given short-text. We evaluate ClassiNets on several benchmark datasets for short-text classification. Our experimental results show that by using ClassiNet, we can statistically significantly improve the accuracy in short-text classification tasks, without having to use any external resources such as thesauri for finding related features.