Attention is Not Always What You Need: Towards Efficient Classification of Domain-Specific Text
This work addresses the need for efficient and explainable models in business applications, showing that simpler methods can be sufficient for domain-specific tasks, which is incremental as it challenges the overuse of complex models.
The paper tackles the problem of domain-specific text classification by comparing attention-based models with a simpler Linear SVM and TF-IDF approach, finding that the linear model achieves comparable accuracy on three datasets.
For large-scale IT corpora with hundreds of classes organized in a hierarchy, the task of accurate classification of classes at the higher level in the hierarchies is crucial to avoid errors propagating to the lower levels. In the business world, an efficient and explainable ML model is preferred over an expensive black-box model, especially if the performance increase is marginal. A current trend in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is towards employing huge pre-trained language models (PLMs) or what is known as self-attention models (e.g., BERT) for almost any kind of NLP task (e.g., question-answering, sentiment analysis, text classification). Despite the widespread use of PLMs and the impressive performance in a broad range of NLP tasks, there is a lack of a clear and well-justified need to as why these models are being employed for domain-specific text classification (TC) tasks, given the monosemic nature of specialized words (i.e., jargon) found in domain-specific text which renders the purpose of contextualized embeddings (e.g., PLMs) futile. In this paper, we compare the accuracies of some state-of-the-art (SOTA) models reported in the literature against a Linear SVM classifier and TFIDF vectorization model on three TC datasets. Results show a comparable performance for the LinearSVM. The findings of this study show that for domain-specific TC tasks, a linear model can provide a comparable, cheap, reproducible, and interpretable alternative to attention-based models.