Improving deep neural network design with new text data representations

Abstract Using traditional machine learning approaches, there is no single feature engineering solution for all text mining and learning tasks. Thus, researchers must determine and implement the best feature engineering approach for each text classification task; however, deep learning allows us to skip this step by extracting and learning high-level features automatically from low-level text representations. Convolutional neural networks, a popular type of neural network for deep learning, have been shown to be effective at performing feature extraction and classification for many domains including text. Recently, it was demonstrated that convolutional neural networks can be used to train classifiers from character-level representations of text. This approach achieved superior performance compared to classifiers trained on word-level text representations, likely due to the use of character-level representations preserving more information from the data. Training neural networks from character level data requires a large volume of instances; however, the large volume of training data and model complexity makes training these networks a slow and computationally expensive task. In this paper, we propose a new method of creating character-level representations of text to reduce the computational costs associated with training a deep convolutional neural network. We demonstrate that our method of character embedding greatly reduces training time and memory use, while significantly improving classification performance. Additionally, we show that our proposed embedding can be used with padded convolutional layers to enable the use of current convolutional network architectures, while still facilitating faster training and higher performance than the previous approach for learning from character-level text.