Multiclass Text Classification on Unbalanced, Sparse and Noisy Data

Abstract

This paper discusses methods to improve the performance of text classification on data that is difficult to classify due to a large number of unbalanced classes with noisy examples. A variety of features are tested, in combination with three different neural-network-based methods with increasing complexity. The classifiers are applied to a songtext--artist dataset which is large, unbalanced and noisy. We come to the conclusion that substantial improvement can be obtained by removing unbalancedness and sparsity from the data. This fulfils a classification task unsatisfactorily---however, with contemporary methods, it is a practical step towards fairly satisfactory results.

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Reproductions