Deep Learning for Hindi Text Classification: A Comparison

Abstract: NLP and especially natural language text analysis have seen great advances in recent times. Usage of deep learning in text processing has revolutionized the techniques for text processing and achieved remarkable results. Different deep learning architectures like CNN, LSTM, and very recent Transformer have been used to achieve state of the art results variety on NLP tasks. In this work, we survey a host of deep learning architectures for text classification tasks. The work is specifically concerned with the classification of Hindi text. The research in the classification of morphologically rich and low resource Hindi language written in Devanagari script has been limited due to the absence of large labeled corpus. In this work, we used translated versions of English data-sets to evaluate models based on CNN, LSTM and Attention. Multilingual pre-trained sentence embeddings based on BERT and LASER are also compared to evaluate their effectiveness for the Hindi language. The paper also serves as a tutorial for popular text classification techniques.