Related papers: Rank over Class: The Untapped Potential of Ranking in Natural Language Processing

Rank over Class: The Untapped Potential of Ranking in Natural Language Processing

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.05160v4
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2021 18:26:42 GMT
Title: Rank over Class: The Untapped Potential of Ranking in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Amir Atapour-Abarghouei, Stephen Bonner, Andrew Stephen McGough
Abstract summary: We argue that many tasks which are currently addressed using classification are in fact being shoehorned into a classification mould. We propose a novel end-to-end ranking approach consisting of a Transformer network responsible for producing representations for a pair of text sequences. In an experiment on a heavily-skewed sentiment analysis dataset, converting ranking results to classification labels yields an approximately 22% improvement over state-of-the-art text classification.
Score: 8.637110868126546
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
Abstract: Text classification has long been a staple within Natural Language Processing (NLP) with applications spanning across diverse areas such as sentiment analysis, recommender systems and spam detection. With such a powerful solution, it is often tempting to use it as the go-to tool for all NLP problems since when you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. However, we argue here that many tasks which are currently addressed using classification are in fact being shoehorned into a classification mould and that if we instead address them as a ranking problem, we not only improve the model, but we achieve better performance. We propose a novel end-to-end ranking approach consisting of a Transformer network responsible for producing representations for a pair of text sequences, which are in turn passed into a context aggregating network outputting ranking scores used to determine an ordering to the sequences based on some notion of relevance. We perform numerous experiments on publicly-available datasets and investigate the applications of ranking in problems often solved using classification. In an experiment on a heavily-skewed sentiment analysis dataset, converting ranking results to classification labels yields an approximately 22% improvement over state-of-the-art text classification, demonstrating the efficacy of text ranking over text classification in certain scenarios.