English

Heavy-tailed Representations, Text Polarity Classification & Data Augmentation

Machine Learning 2021-03-26 v2 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

The dominant approaches to text representation in natural language rely on learning embeddings on massive corpora which have convenient properties such as compositionality and distance preservation. In this paper, we develop a novel method to learn a heavy-tailed embedding with desirable regularity properties regarding the distributional tails, which allows to analyze the points far away from the distribution bulk using the framework of multivariate extreme value theory. In particular, a classifier dedicated to the tails of the proposed embedding is obtained which performance outperforms the baseline. This classifier exhibits a scale invariance property which we leverage by introducing a novel text generation method for label preserving dataset augmentation. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real text data demonstrate the relevance of the proposed framework and confirm that this method generates meaningful sentences with controllable attribute, e.g. positive or negative sentiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.11593,
  title  = {Heavy-tailed Representations, Text Polarity Classification & Data Augmentation},
  author = {Hamid Jalalzai and Pierre Colombo and Chloé Clavel and Eric Gaussier and Giovanna Varni and Emmanuel Vignon and Anne Sabourin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.11593},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:27:19.937Z