Distributional Representations of Words for Short Text Classification

Traditional supervised learning approaches to common NLP tasks depend heavily on manual annotation, which is labor intensive and time consuming, and often suffer from data sparseness. In this paper we show how to mitigate the problems in short text classification (STC) through word embeddings ‐ distributional representations of words learned from large unlabeled data. The word embeddings are trained from the entire English Wikipedia text. We assume that a short text document is a specific sample of one distribution in a Bayesian framework. A Gaussian process approach is used to model the distribution of words. The task of classification becomes a simple problem of selecting the most probable Gaussian distribution. This approach is compared with those based on the classical maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach. Our approach achieved better performance and also showed advantages in dealing with unseen words.