Computing and Informatics

In this paper, we discuss the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for hierarchical text classification using local top-down approaches. We present experimental results implementing a local classification per node approach, a local classification per parent node approach, and a local classification per level approach. A 20Newsgroup hierarchical training dataset with more than 20 categories and three hierarchical levels was used to train the models. The experiments involved several variations of hyperparameters settings such as batch size, embedding size, and number of available examples from the training dataset, including two variation of CNN model text embedding such as static (stat) and random (rand). The results demonstrated that our proposed use of CNNs outperformed flat CNN baseline model and both the flat and hierarchical support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) baseline models. In particular, hierarchical text classification with CNN-stat models using local per parent node and local per level approaches achieved compelling results and outperformed the former and latter state-of-the-art models. However, using CNN with local per node approach for hierarchical text classification underperformed and achieved worse results. Furthermore, we performed a detailed comparison between the proposed hierarchical local approaches with CNNs. The results indicated that the hierarchical local classification per level approach using the CNN model with static text embedding achieved the best results, surpassing the flat SVM and LR baseline models by 7 % and 13 %, surpassing the flat CNN baseline by 5 %, and surpassing the h-SVM and h-LR models by 5 % and 10 %, respectively.