A Hierarchical Neural-Network-Based Document Representation Approach for Text Classification

Document representation is widely used in practical application, for example, sentiment classification, text retrieval, and text classification. Previous work is mainly based on the statistics and the neural networks, which suffer from data sparsity and model interpretability, respectively. In this paper, we propose a general framework for document representation with a hierarchical architecture. In particular, we incorporate the hierarchical architecture into three traditional neural-network models for document representation, resulting in three hierarchical neural representation models for document classification, that is, TextHFT, TextHRNN, and TextHCNN. Our comprehensive experimental results on two public datasets, that is, Yelp 2016 and Amazon Reviews (Electronics), show that our proposals with hierarchical architecture outperform the corresponding neural-network models for document classification, resulting in a significant improvement ranging from 4.65% to 35.08% in terms of accuracy with a comparable (or substantially less) expense of time consumption. In addition, we find that the long documents benefit more from the hierarchical architecture than the short ones as the improvement in terms of accuracy on long documents is greater than that on short documents.