tax2vec: Constructing Interpretable Features from Taxonomies for Short Text Classification

The use of background knowledge remains largely unexploited in many text classification tasks. In this work, we explore word taxonomies as means for constructing new semantic features, which may improve the performance and robustness of the learned classifiers. We propose tax2vec, a parallel algorithm for constructing taxonomy based features, and demonstrate its use on six short-text classification problems, including gender, age and personality type prediction, drug effectiveness and side effect prediction, and news topic prediction. The experimental results indicate that the interpretable features constructed using tax2vec can notably improve the performance of classifiers; the constructed features, in combination with fast, linear classifiers tested against strong baselines, such as hierarchical attention neural networks, achieved comparable or better classification results on short documents. Further, tax2vec can also serve for extraction of corpus-specific keywords. Finally, we investigated the semantic space of potential features where we observe a similarity with the well known Zipf's law.