Support vector machines and Word2vec for text classification with semantic features

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of new available information presented to us online on a daily basis, text classification becomes imperative in order to classify and maintain it. Word2vec offers a unique perspective to the text mining community. By converting words and phrases into a vector representation, word2vec takes an entirely new approach on text classification. Based on the assumption that word2vec brings extra semantic features that helps in text classification, our work demonstrates the effectiveness of word2vec by showing that tf-idf and word2vec combined can outperform tf-idf because word2vec provides complementary features (e.g. semantics that tf-idf can't capture) to tf-idf. Our results show that the combination of word2vec weighted by tf-idf and tf-idf does not outperform tf-idf consistently. It is consistent enough to say the combination of the two can outperform either individually.