A Hybrid BLSTM-C Neural Network Proposed for Chinese Text Classification

Text classification has always been a concern in area of natural language processing, especially nowadays the data are getting massive due to the development of Internet. Recurrent neural network (RNN) is one of the most popular method for natural language processing due to its recurrent architecture which give it ability to process serialized information. In the meanwhile, Convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown its ability to extract features from visual imagery. This paper combine the advantages of RNN and CNN and proposed a model called BLSTM-C for Chinese text classification. BLSTM-C begins with a Bi-directional long short-term memory (BLSTM) layer, which is an special kind of RNN, to get a sequence output based on the past context and the future context. Then it feed this sequence to CNN layer which is utilized to extract features from the previous sequence. We evaluate BLSTM-C model on several experiments such as sentiment classification and category classification and the result shows our model's satisfying performance on these text tasks.