Hawkes Process Classification through Discriminative Modeling of Text

Abstract: Social media has provided a platform for users to gather and share information and stay updated with the news. Such networks also provide a platform to users where they can engage in conversations. However, such micro-blogging platforms like Twitter restricts the length of text. Due to paucity of sufficient word occurrences in such posts, classification of this information is a challenging task using standard tools of NLP. Moreover, high complexity and dynamics of the posts in social media makes text classification a challenging problem. However, considering additional cues in the form of past labels and times associated with the post can be potentially helpful for performing text classification in a better way. To address this problem, we propose models based on the Hawkes process (HP) which can naturally incorporate the temporal features and past labels along with textual features for improving short text classification. In particular, we propose a discriminative approach to model text in HP where the text features parameterize the base intensity and/or the triggering kernel. Another major contribution is to consider kernel to be a function of both time and text, and further use a neural network to model the kernel. This enables modelling and effectively learning the text along with the historical influences for tweet classification. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed techniques on standard benchmarks for rumour stance classification.