Image-based Text Classification using 2D Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose a new approach to text classification in which we consider the input text as an image and apply 2D Convolutional Neural Networks to learn the local and global semantics of the sentences from the variations of the visual patterns of words. Our approach demonstrates that it is possible to get semantically meaningful features from images with text without using optical character recognition and sequential processing pipelines, techniques that traditional natural language processing algorithms require. To validate our approach, we present results for two applications: text classification and dialog modeling. Using a 2D Convolutional Neural Network, we were able to outperform the state-ofart accuracy results for a Chinese text classification task and achieved promising results for seven English text classification tasks. Furthermore, our approach outperformed the memory networks without match types when using out of vocabulary entities from Task 4 of the bAbI dialog dataset

From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics

Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

On the Role of Text Preprocessing in Neural Network Architectures: An Evaluation Study on Text Categorization and Sentiment Analysis

Text preprocessing is often the first step in the pipeline of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system, with potential impact in its final performance. Despite its importance, text preprocessing has not received much attention in the deep learning literature. In this paper we investigate the impact of simple text preprocessing decisions (particularly tokenizing, lemmatizing, lowercasing and multiword grouping) on the performance of a standard neural text classifier. We perform an extensive evaluation on standard benchmarks from text categorization and sentiment analysis. While our experiments show that a simple tokenization of input text is generally adequate, they also highlight significant degrees of variability across preprocessing techniques. This reveals the importance of paying attention to this usually-overlooked step in the pipeline, particularly when comparing different models. Finally, our evaluation provides insights into the best preprocessing practices for training word embeddings.Comment: Blackbox EMNLP 2018. 7 page

Text Categorization and Machine Learning Methods: Current State Of The Art

In this informative age, we find many documents are available in digital forms which need classification of the text. For solving this major problem present researchers focused on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of pre classified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The main benefit of the present approach is consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts where effectiveness, less use of expert work and straightforward portability to different domains are possible. The paper examines the main approaches to text categorization comparing the machine learning paradigm and present state of the art. Various issues pertaining to three different text similarity problems, namely, semantic, conceptual and contextual are also discussed

Processing a Mayan Corpus for Enhancing our Knowledge of Ancient Scripts

International audienceThe ancient Maya writing comprises more than 500 signs, either syllabic or semantic, and is largely deciphered, with a variable degree of reliability. We applied to the Dresden Codex, one of the only three manuscripts that reached us, encoded for LATEX with the mayaTEX package, our graded representation method of hybrid non-supervised learning, intermediate between clustering and oblique factor analysis, and following Hellinger metrics, in order to obtain a nuanced image of themes dealt with: the statistical entities are the 214 codex segments, and their attributes are the 1687 extracted bigrams of signs. For comparison, we introduced in this approach an exogenous element, i.e. the splitting of the composed signs into their elements, for a finer elicitation of the contents. The results are visualized as a set of "thematic concordances": for each homogeneous semantic context, the most salient bigrams or sequences of bigrams are displayed in their textual environment, which sheds a new light on the meaning of some little understood glyphs, placing them in clearly understandable contexts