http://lattes.cnpq.br/5089116729963334; VASCONCELOS, Larissa Lucena.
Abstract:
Text classification is one of the mainly investigated challenges in Natural Language Processing research.The higher performance of a classification model depends on a representation
that can extract valuable information about the texts. The problem discussed in this doctoral
research is how to enhance text representations by incorporating semantics to improve the
efficacy of textclassification models. Aiming not to lose crucial local text information, a
way to represent texts is through flows, sequences of information collected from texts. This
thesis proposes an approach that combines various techniques to represent texts: the representation by flows, the power of the word embeddings text representation associated with
lexicon information via semantic similarity distances, and the extraction of features inspired
by well-established audio analysis features. The approach splits the text in to sentences and
calculates a semantic similarity metric to a lexicon on an embedding vector space. The sequence of semantic similarity metrics composes the text flow. Then, the method performs
the twenty-five audio analysis features inspired ( called Audio-Like Features) extraction. The
features adaptation from audio analysis comes from a similitude between a text flow and a
digital signal, in addition to the existing relationship between text, speech, and audio. The
conducted experimental evaluation comprises five text classification tasks: Fake News Detection in English and Portuguese; Newspaper Columns versus News; Sentiment Polarity
involving Movie Reviews in Portuguese. The experiments
comprised six datasets and six lexicons involving the English and Portuguese languages.
The approach efficacy is compared to baselines that embed semantics in text representation:
the strong Paragraph Vector and the BERT. The objective of the experiments was to investigate if the proposed approach could compete with the baselines methods efficacy or improve
their effectiveness when associated with them. The experimental evaluation demonstrates
that the method can enhance the baseline methods classification efficacy in four of the five
scenarios. In the Fake News Detectionin Portuguese task, the approach surpassed the baselines and obtained the best effectiveness (PR-AUC=0.98). The proposed features achieved
better results on shallow learning models than deep learning in three tasks. None subset of
features appeared among the most impacting ones in all classification tasks, highlighting the
importance of all the twenty-five features.