Impact of convolutional neural network and FastText embedding on text classification

Efficient word representation techniques (word embeddings) with modern machine learning models have shown reasonable improvement on automatic text classification tasks. However, the effectiveness of such techniques has not been evaluated yet in terms of insufficient word vector representation for training. Convolutional Neural Network has achieved significant results in pattern recognition, image analysis, and text classification. This study investigates the application of the CNN model on text classification problems by experimentation and analysis. We trained our classification model with a prominent word embedding generation model, Fast Text on publically available datasets, six benchmark datasets including Ag News, Amazon Full and Polarity, Yahoo Question Answer, Yelp Full, and Polarity. Furthermore, the proposed model has been tested on the Twitter US airlines non-benchmark dataset as well. The analysis indicates that using Fast Text as word embedding is a very promising approach.