Explainable and Transferrable Text Categorization

Automated argument stance (pro/contra) detection is a challenging text categorization problem, especially if said arguments are to be detected for new topics. In previous research, we designed and evaluated an explainable machine learning based classifier. It was capable to achieve 96% F1 for argument stance recognition within the same topic and 60% F1 for previously unseen topics, which informed our hypothesis, that there are two sets of features in argument stance recognition: General features and topic specific features. An advantage of the described system is its quick transferability to new problems. Besides providing further details about the developed C3 TFIDF-SVM classifier, we investigate the classifiers effectiveness for different text categorization problems spanning two natural languages. Besides the quick transferability, the generation of human readable explanations about why specific results were achieved is a key feature of the described approach. We further investigate the generated explanation understandability and conduct a survey about how understandable the classifier’s explanations are.