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Linear Classifier: An Often-Forgotten Baseline for Text Classification
Journal
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Journal Volume
2
End Page
1888
ISBN
9781959429715
Date Issued
2023-01-01
Author(s)
Abstract
Large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT are popular solutions for text classification. Due to the superior performance of these advanced methods, nowadays, people often directly train them for a few epochs and deploy the obtained model. In this opinion paper, we point out that this way may only sometimes get satisfactory results. We argue the importance of running a simple baseline like linear classifiers on bag-of-words features along with advanced methods. First, for many text data, linear methods show competitive performance, high efficiency, and robustness. Second, advanced models such as BERT may only achieve the best results if properly applied. Simple baselines help to confirm whether the results of advanced models are acceptable. Our experimental results fully support these points.
Type
conference paper