%0 Conference Proceedings %D 2017 %T Class-based Prediction Errors to Categorize Text with Out-of-vocabulary Words %A Joan Serrà %A Ilias Leontiadis %A Dimitris Spathis %A Gianluca Stringhini %A Jeremy Blackburn %A Athena Vakali %X
Common approaches to text categorization essentially rely either on n-gram counts or on word embeddings. This presents important difficulties in highly dynamic or quickly-interacting environments, where the appearance of new words and/or varied misspellings is the norm. A paradigmatic example of this situation is abusive online behavior, with social networks and media platforms struggling to effectively combat uncommon or non-blacklisted hate words. To better deal with these issues in those fast-paced environments, we propose using the error signal of class-based language models as input to text classification algorithms. In particular, we train a next-character prediction model for any given class, and then exploit the error of such class-based models to inform a neural network classifier. This way, we shift from the ability to describe seen documents to the ability to predict unseen content. Preliminary studies using out-of-vocabulary splits from abusive tweet data show promising results, outperforming competitive text categorization strategies by 4–11%.
%S ALW1'17 %C Vancouver, Canada %G eng