2021-09: Representation Learning for Short Text Clustering

Date: 03/09/2021, 2-3 pm 

Title:

Quantum Computing and Quantum Machine Learning: Concepts, Applications and Major Players

Abstract:

Effective representation learning is critical for short text clustering due to the sparse, high-dimensional and noise attributes of short text corpus. Existing pretrained  models (e.g., Word2vec and BERT) have greatly improved the  expressiveness for short text representations with more condensed, low-dimensional and continuous features compared to the traditional Bag-of-Words (BoW) model. However, these models are trained for general purposes and thus are suboptimal for the short text clustering task. In this paper, we propose two methods to exploit the unsupervised autoencoder (AE) framework to further tune the short text representations based on these pre-trained text models for optimal clustering performance. In our first method Structural Text Network Graph Autoencoder (STN-GAE), we exploit the structural text information among the corpus by constructing a text network, and then adopt graph convolutional network as encoder to fuse the structural features with the pre-trained text features for text representation learning. In our second method Soft Cluster Assignment Autoencoder (SCA-AE), we adopt an extra soft cluster assignment constraint on the latent space of autoencoder to encourage the learned text representations to be more clustering-friendly. We tested two methods on seven popular short text datasets, and the experimental results show that when only using the pre-trained model for short text clustering, BERT performs better than BoW and Word2vec. However, as long as we further tune the pre-trained representations, the proposed method like SCA-AE can greatly increase the clustering performance, and the accuracy improvement compared to use BERT alone could reach as much as 14%.

Speaker:

Hui Yin received the bachelor’s degree in computer science and technology in 2005 and the master’s degree in computer application technology in 2008. She was a Lecturer with the Yanbian University of Jilin province, China, from 2008 to 2018. She is currently third year PhD student at School of IT, Deakin University. Her research interests include data mining, natural language processing, deep learning and representation learning.