Text Classification
SemImage: Semantic Image Representation for Text, a Novel Framework for Embedding Disentangled Linguistic Features
We propose SemImage, a novel method for representing a text document as a two-dimensional semantic image to be processed by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In a SemImage, each word is represented as a pixel in a 2D image: rows correspond to sentences and an additional boundary row is inserted between sentences to mark semantic transitions. Each pixel is not a typical RGB value but a vector in a disentangled HSV color space, encoding different linguistic features: the Hue with two components H_cos and H_sin to account for circularity encodes the topic, Saturation encodes the sentiment, and Value encodes intensity or certainty. We enforce this disentanglement via a multi-task learning framework: a ColorMapper network maps each word embedding to the HSV space, and auxiliary supervision is applied to the Hue and Saturation channels to predict topic and sentiment labels, alongside the main task objective. The insertion of dynamically computed boundary rows between sentences yields sharp visual boundaries in the image when consecutive sentences are semantically dissimilar, effectively making paragraph breaks salient. We integrate SemImage with standard 2D CNNs (e.g., ResNet) for document classification. Experiments on multi-label datasets (with both topic and sentiment annotations) and single-label benchmarks demonstrate that SemImage can achieve competitive or better accuracy than strong text classification baselines (including BERT and hierarchical attention networks) while offering enhanced interpretability. An ablation study confirms the importance of the multi-channel HSV representation and the dynamic boundary rows. Finally, we present visualizations of SemImage that qualitatively reveal clear patterns corresponding to topic shifts and sentiment changes in the generated image, suggesting that our representation makes these linguistic features visible to both humans and machines.
A centroid based framework for text classification in itsm environments
Mohanna, Hossein, Ait-Bachir, Ali
Text classification with hierarchical taxonomies is a fundamental requirement in IT Service Management (ITSM) systems, where support tickets must be categorized into tree-structured taxonomies. We present a dual-embedding centroid-based classification framework that maintains separate semantic and lexical centroid representations per category, combining them through reciprocal rank fusion at inference time. The framework achieves performance competitive with Support Vector Machines (hierarchical F1: 0.731 vs 0.727) while providing interpretability through centroid representations. Evaluated on 8,968 ITSM tickets across 123 categories, this method achieves 5.9 times faster training and up to 152 times faster incremental updates. With 8.6-8.8 times speedup across batch sizes (100-1000 samples) when excluding embedding computation. These results make the method suitable for production ITSM environments prioritizing interpretability and operational efficiency.
OpenCML: End-to-End Framework of Open-world Machine Learning to Learn Unknown Classes Incrementally
Parmar, Jitendra, Thakur, Praveen Singh
Open-world machine learning is an emerging technique in artificial intelligence, where conventional machine learning models often follow closed-world assumptions, which can hinder their ability to retain previously learned knowledge for future tasks. However, automated intelligence systems must learn about novel classes and previously known tasks. The proposed model offers novel learning classes in an open and continuous learning environment. It consists of two different but connected tasks. First, it discovers unknown classes in the data and creates novel classes; next, it learns how to perform class incrementally for each new class. Together, they enable continual learning, allowing the system to expand its understanding of the data and improve over time. The proposed model also outperformed existing approaches in open-world learning. Furthermore, it demonstrated strong performance in continuous learning, achieving a highest average accuracy of 82.54% over four iterations and a minimum accuracy of 65.87%.
A Unified BERT-CNN-BiLSTM Framework for Simultaneous Headline Classification and Sentiment Analysis of Bangla News
Raquib, Mirza, Akash, Munazer Montasir, Ahmed, Tawhid, Murad, Saydul Akbar, Prity, Farida Siddiqi, Hossain, Mohammad Amzad, Polok, Asif Pervez, Rahimi, Nick
Abstract--In our daily lives, newspapers are an essential information source that impacts how the public talks about present-day issues. However, effectively navigating the vast amount of news content from different newspapers and online news portals can be challenging. Newspaper headlines with sentiment analysis tell us what the news is about (e.g., politics, sports) and how the news makes us feel (positive, negative, neutral). This helps us quickly understand the emotional tone of the news. This research presents a state-of-the-art approach to Bangla news headline classification combined with sentiment analysis applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, particularly the hybrid transfer learning model BERT -CNN-BiLSTM. We have explored a dataset called BAN-ABSA of 9014 news headlines, which is the first time that has been experimented with simultaneously in the headline and sentiment categorization in Bengali newspapers. Over this imbalanced dataset, we applied two experimental strategies: technique-1, where undersampling and oversampling are applied before splitting, and technique-2, where undersam-pling and oversampling are applied after splitting on the In technique-1 oversampling provided the strongest performance, both headline and sentiment, that is 78.57% and 73.43% respectively, while technique-2 delivered the highest result when trained directly on the original imbalanced dataset, both headline and sentiment, that is 81.37% and 64.46% respectively. The proposed model BERT -CNN-BiLSTM significantly outperforms all baseline models in classification tasks, and achieves new state-of-the-art results for Bangla news headline classification and sentiment analysis. These results demonstrate the importance of leveraging both the headline and sentiment datasets, and provide a strong baseline for Bangla text classification in low-resource. The rapid growth of digital content and the internet has necessitated robust natural language processing (NLP) systems that can analyze and comprehend human language properly. For instance, a language like Bangla, which is one of the most spoken languages in the world, has remained mostly overlooked as compared to English and other well-resourced languages. Newspapers continue to be one of the most significant information sources and the headlines play a crucial role by providing a quick idea of news content. At such times, headlines often convey a mood that can impact how readers interpret and react to news.
A Hybrid Classical-Quantum Fine Tuned BERT for Text Classification
Masum, Abu Kaisar Mohammad, Mahmud, Naveed, Najafi, M. Hassan, Aygun, Sercan
Fine-tuning BERT for text classification can be computationally challenging and requires careful hyper-parameter tuning. Recent studies have highlighted the potential of quantum algorithms to outperform conventional methods in machine learning and text classification tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that integrates an n-qubit quantum circuit with a classical BERT model for text classification. We evaluate the performance of the fine-tuned classical-quantum BERT and demonstrate its feasibility as well as its potential in advancing this research area. Our experimental results show that the proposed hybrid model achieves performance that is competitive with, and in some cases better than, the classical baselines on standard benchmark datasets. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates the adaptability of classical-quantum models for fine-tuning pre-trained models across diverse datasets. Overall, the hybrid model highlights the promise of quantum computing in achieving improved performance for text classification tasks.
Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (AGFF) Model for Integrating Statistical and Semantic Features in News Text Classification
News text classification is a crucial task in natural language processing, essential for organizing and filtering the massive volume of digital content. Traditional methods typically rely on statistical features like term frequencies or TF-IDF values, which are effective at capturing word-level importance but often fail to reflect contextual meaning. In contrast, modern deep learning approaches utilize semantic features to understand word usage within context, yet they may overlook simple, high-impact statistical indicators. This paper introduces an Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (AGFF) model that combines statistical and semantic features in a unified framework. The model applies an attention-based mechanism to dynamically determine the relative importance of each feature type, enabling more informed classification decisions. Through evaluation on benchmark news datasets, the AGFF model demonstrates superior performance compared to both traditional statistical models and purely semantic deep learning models. The results confirm that strategic integration of diverse feature types can significantly enhance classification accuracy. Additionally, ablation studies validate the contribution of each component in the fusion process. The findings highlight the model's ability to balance and exploit the complementary strengths of statistical and semantic representations, making it a practical and effective solution for real-world news classification tasks.
Supervised Word Mover's Distance
Accurately measuring the similarity between text documents lies at the core of many real world applications of machine learning. These include web-search ranking, document recommendation, multi-lingual document matching, and article categorization. Recently, a new document metric, the word mover's distance (WMD), has been proposed with unprecedented results on kNN-based document classification. The WMD elevates high quality word embeddings to document metrics by formulating the distance between two documents as an optimal transport problem between the embedded words. However, the document distances are entirely unsupervised and lack a mechanism to incorporate supervision when available. In this paper we propose an efficient technique to learn a supervised metric, which we call the Supervised WMD (S-WMD) metric. Our algorithm learns document distances that measure the underlying semantic differences between documents by leveraging semantic differences between individual words discovered during supervised training. This is achieved with an linear transformation of the underlying word embedding space and tailored word-specific weights, learned to minimize the stochastic leave-one-out nearest neighbor classification error on a per-document level. We evaluate our metric on eight real-world text classification tasks on which S-WMD consistently outperforms almost all of our 26 competitive baselines.
Mind the Gap: Bridging Prior Shift in Realistic Few-Shot Crop-Type Classification
Reuss, Joana, Gikalo, Ekaterina, Kรถrner, Marco
Real-world agricultural distributions often suffer from severe class imbalance, typically following a long-tailed distribution. Labeled datasets for crop-type classification are inherently scarce and remain costly to obtain. When working with such limited data, training sets are frequently constructed to be artificially balanced -- in particular in the case of few-shot learning -- failing to reflect real-world conditions. This mismatch induces a shift between training and test label distributions, degrading real-world generalization. To address this, we propose Dirichlet Prior Augmentation (DirPA), a novel method that simulates an unknown label distribution skew of the target domain proactively during model training. Specifically, we model the real-world distribution as Dirichlet-distributed random variables, effectively performing a prior augmentation during few-shot learning. Our experiments show that DirPA successfully shifts the decision boundary and stabilizes the training process by acting as a dynamic feature regularizer.
Learn to Select: Exploring Label Distribution Divergence for In-Context Demonstration Selection in Text Classification
Jiang, Ye, Wang, Taihang, Liu, Youzheng, Wang, Yimin, Xia, Yuhan, Long, Yunfei
In-context learning (ICL) for text classification, which uses a few input-label demonstrations to describe a task, has demonstrated impressive performance on large language models (LLMs). However, the selection of in-context demonstrations plays a crucial role and can significantly affect LLMs' performance. Most existing demonstration selection methods primarily focus on semantic similarity between test inputs and demonstrations, often overlooking the importance of label distribution alignment. To address this limitation, we propose a two-stage demonstration selection method, TopK + Label Distribution Divergence (L2D), which leverages a fine-tuned BERT-like small language model (SLM) to generate label distributions and calculate their divergence for both test inputs and candidate demonstrations. This enables the selection of demonstrations that are not only semantically similar but also aligned in label distribution with the test input. Extensive experiments across seven text classification benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms previous demonstration selection strategies. Further analysis reveals a positive correlation between the performance of LLMs and the accuracy of the underlying SLMs used for label distribution estimation.