Effectively Classify Short Texts with Sparse Representation Using Entropy Weighted Constraint

Short texts have become a kind of prevalent source of information, and the classification of these short texts in various forms is valuable to many applications. However, most existing short text classification approaches circumvent the sparsity problem by extending short texts (or their feature representations) or exploiting additional information to adapt short texts to traditional text classification approaches. In this paper, we try to solve the sparsity problem of short text classification in a different direction: adapting the classifier to short texts. We propose a sparse representation short text classification method based on entropy weighted constraint. The main idea behind this study is to consider that the short texts are similar in potentially specific subspace. Specifically, we first introduce word embedding to represent the initial sparse representation dictionary, and then a fast feature subset selection algorithm is used to filter the dictionary. Again, we design an objective function based on sparse representation of entropy weight constraint. The optimal value of the objective function is obtained by Lagrange multiplier method. Finally, the distance between the short text to be classified and the short text in each class is calculated under the subspace, and the short text is classified according to three classification rules. Experiments over five datasets show that the proposed approach can effectively alleviate the problem of sparse feature of short text and is more efficient and effective than the existing short text classification method.