DPTCN: A novel deep CNN model for short text classification

As an important branch of Nature Language Processing (NLP), how to extract useful text information and effective long-range associations has always been a bottleneck for text classification. With the great effort of deep learning researchers, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have made remarkable achievements in Computer Vision but still controversial in NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel deep CNN named Deep Pyramid Temporal Convolutional Network (DPTCN) for short text classification, which is mainly consisting of concatenated embedding layer, causal convolution, 1/2 max pooling down-sampling and residual blocks. It is worth mentioning that our work was highly inspired by two well-designed models: one is temporal convolutional network for sequential modeling; another is deep pyramid CNN for text categorization; as their applicability and pertinence remind us how to build a model in a special domain. In the experiments, we evaluate the proposed model on 7 datasets with 6 models and analyze the impact of three different embedding methods. The results prove that our work is a good attempt to apply word-level deep convolutional network in short text classification.