Exploring the Relationship Between Algorithm Performance, Vocabulary, and Run-Time in Text Classification

Wilson Fearn, Orion Weller, Kevin Seppi


Abstract
Text classification is a significant branch of natural language processing, and has many applications including document classification and sentiment analysis. Unsurprisingly, those who do text classification are concerned with the run-time of their algorithms, many of which depend on the size of the corpus’ vocabulary due to their bag-of-words representation. Although many studies have examined the effect of preprocessing techniques on vocabulary size and accuracy, none have examined how these methods affect a model’s run-time. To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive study that examines how preprocessing techniques affect the vocabulary size, model performance, and model run-time, evaluating ten techniques over four models and two datasets. We show that some individual methods can reduce run-time with no loss of accuracy, while some combinations of methods can trade 2-5% of the accuracy for up to a 65% reduction of run-time. Furthermore, some combinations of preprocessing techniques can even provide a 15% reduction in run-time while simultaneously improving model accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.244
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3069–3082
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.244
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.244
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wilson Fearn, Orion Weller, and Kevin Seppi. 2021. Exploring the Relationship Between Algorithm Performance, Vocabulary, and Run-Time in Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3069–3082, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring the Relationship Between Algorithm Performance, Vocabulary, and Run-Time in Text Classification (Fearn et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.244.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.244.mp4
Code
 wfearn/preprocessing-paper