English

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Text Classification

Computation and Language 2017-01-30 v2 Machine Learning Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

The dominant approach for many NLP tasks are recurrent neural networks, in particular LSTMs, and convolutional neural networks. However, these architectures are rather shallow in comparison to the deep convolutional networks which have pushed the state-of-the-art in computer vision. We present a new architecture (VDCNN) for text processing which operates directly at the character level and uses only small convolutions and pooling operations. We are able to show that the performance of this model increases with depth: using up to 29 convolutional layers, we report improvements over the state-of-the-art on several public text classification tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that very deep convolutional nets have been applied to text processing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.01781,
  title  = {Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Text Classification},
  author = {Alexis Conneau and Holger Schwenk and Loïc Barrault and Yann Lecun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.01781},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

10 pages, EACL 2017, camera-ready

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:18:42.428Z