TextConvoNet:A Convolutional Neural Network based Architecture for Text Classification

In recent years, deep learning-based models have significantly improved the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Specifically, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), initially used for computer vision, has shown remarkable performance for text data in various NLP problems. Most of the existing CNN-based models use 1-dimensional convolving filters n-gram detectors), where each filter specialises in extracting n-grams features of a particular input word embedding. The input word embeddings, also called sentence matrix, is treated as a matrix where each row is a word vector. Thus, it allows the model to apply one-dimensional convolution and only extract n-gram based features from a sentence matrix. These features can be termed as intra-sentence n-gram features. To the extent of our knowledge, all the existing CNN models are based on the aforementioned concept. In this paper, we present a CNN-based architecture TextConvoNet that 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. To evaluate the performance of TextConvoNet, we perform an experimental study on five text classification datasets. The results are evaluated by using various performance metrics. The experimental results show that the presented TextConvoNet outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models for text classification purposes.