Identifying Predictive Features for Textual Genre Classification: the Key Role of Syntax

Andrea Cimino, Martijn Wieling, Felice Dell’Orletta, Simonetta Montemagni et Giulia Venturi

Résumé

The paper investigates impact and role of different feature types for the specific task of Automatic Genre Classification with the final aim of identifying the most predictive ones. The goal was pursued by carrying out incremental feature selection through Grafting using different sets of linguistic features. Achieved results for discriminating among four traditional textual genres show the key role played by syntactic features, whose impact turned out to vary across genres.

1 Introduction

1Automatic classification of textual genres has always received significant attention from both theoretical and application perspectives. On the one hand, it has been considered relevant by linguists and educators to teach students the correct way of writing in specific communicative scenarios (Biber, 1995; Lee, 2001). On the other hand, the classification of textual genres is seen as a way to cope with the well known problem of information overload: the exploitation of information about document genre can help to develop more accurate Information Retrieval tools. Genre identification has been considered a key factor for reducing irrelevant results of search engines, as users would be able to specify the desired textual genre along with the keywords expressing the content they are looking for (Santini, 2004; Lim, 2004; Santini, 2007). In fact, document genre and document content represent orthogonal dimensions of classifications (Finn, 2003).

2A variety of different approaches to Automatic Genre Classification (AGC) has been proposed so far differing at the level of the genre and the typology of features considered. According to the widely acknowledged fact that no established classification of genres exists (see e.g. Sharoff (2010) or Biber (2009)), previous studies focused on ‘traditional genres’ such as journalism, handbooks, academic prose, see among the others (Kessler, 1997; Stamatatos, 2001; Fang, 2010), and on ‘web genres’, i.e. genres of web pages, see e.g. (Santini, 2004; Lim, 2004; Mehler, 2010).

3Despite the great interest in the investigation of which linguistic features qualify a text genre (Biber, 2009; Fang, 2015), so far little effort has been devoted to use sophisticated NLP techniques, such as syntactic parsing, to capture complex linguistic features for the automatic classification of textual genres. Differently from other application scenarios where the form (the style) of a document is investigated, such as e.g. Authorship Attribution (Cranenburgh, 2012), Readability Assessment (Collins, 2014) and Native Language Identification (Tetreault, 2013), AGC approaches proposed so far mainly focus on word level linguistic features, in particular the distribution of function words, word frequency, n–gram models of both characters and Parts–Of-Speech (Santini, 2004; Crossley, 2007; Mehler, 2010) or finer-grained Parts–Of-Speech tags including morpho-syntactic features such as verb tense (Fang, 2010). Very few studies rely on features extracted from syntactically annotated texts, the exception being Stamatatos (2001) who combines lexical features (i.e. word frequency) with features extracted from the output of a chunk boundary detector (e.g. the distribution of noun, verbal, adjectival phrases), the average number of words included in verbal phrases. Similar structural features have been also used by (Lim, 2004) who combined web–specific features (e.g. HTML tags) with lexical information and features aiming at capturing the syntactic structure of a sentence, e.g. the distribution of declarative and imperative sentences, syntactic ambiguities, etc.

4In this paper, we tackle the AGC task for traditional genres (namely literary, scientific, educational and journalistic texts) by using different types of linguistic features, i.e. lexical, morphosyntactic and syntactic. In particular, the following research questions are addressed: i) which are the most effective features to classify a textual genre, and ii) whether and to what extent features identified as most effective remain the same across different genres. These questions have been addressed by carrying out incremental feature selection with the final aim of identifying the most predictive ones. So far, studies focused on the best set of features to classify textual genres have been carried out mainly on English. In this paper, this issue is investigated for a typologically different language, Italian.

2 Model training and feature ranking

5In order to identify and rank the most important features playing a role in genre classification, we used GRAFTING (Perkins, 2003). This approach allows us to simultaneously train a maximum entropy model while also including incremental feature selection. Grafting uses a gradient-based heuristic to select the most promising feature (which is added to the set of selected features S), and subsequently performs a full weight optimization over all features in S. This process is repeated until a certain stopping condition is reached. The stopping condition integrates l1 regularization in the grafting approach. This means that only those features are included (with a non-zero weight) if the l1 penalty is outweighed by the reduction of the objective function. Consequently, overfitting is prevented by excluding noisy features, or those that change value infrequently. In our case, the l1 penalty was selected on the basis of evaluating maximum entropy models (using 10-fold cross validation) using varying l1 values (range: 1e-11, 1e-10, ..., 0.1, 1).

6For selecting the features and estimating their weights, we used TINYEST1, a grafting-capable maximum entropy parameter estimator for ranking tasks (De Kok, 2011; De Kok, 2013). Even though our task is not a ranking task, it can be used for binary classification by assigning a high score (1) to the correct class and a low score (0) to the incorrect class. A similar approach was followed by Dell’Orletta (2014) for discriminating between easy–to–read vs difficult–to–read sentences. As the focus of the present study is on the classification of texts belonging to different traditional genres, we created four separate binary classifiers which were trained to distinguish Literature texts from non-Literature (i.e. the three remaining genres) texts, Educational texts from non-Educational texts, etc. A text was assigned the class of the classifier which returned the highest score.

3 Typology of Features

7Various types of features have been proposed in the literature for the automatic classification of text genres. Following Stamatatos (2001) and Lim (2004), we combine token–based and structural features. Token–based features were extracted from the top list of the most frequent lemmata in the training corpus and represented in terms of the relative frequency of each lemma in each document. Structural features were extracted from the considered corpora morpho–syntactically tagged by the POS tagger described in (Dell’Orletta, 2009) and dependency–parsed by the DeSR parser using Multi–Layer Perceptron (Attardi, 2009). As shown in Table 1, they range across different linguistic description levels (lexical, morpho– syntactic and syntactic) for a total of 90 features that resulted to be informative “fingerprints” of the form of a text, on issues of e.g. genre, style, authorship or readability.

4 Experiments

4.1 Experimental Setup

8We used an Italian corpus including documents representative of four different genres: educational material (Dell’Orletta, 2011), newspaper articles (Marinelli, 2003), literary texts (Marinelli, 2003) and scientific papers (Dell’Orletta, 2014). The whole corpus was split up into a training set (136 documents for the Education genre, 579 for the Journalism genre, 365 for the Literature genre and 317 for the Scientific genre), and a held-out test set (60 documents for each genre).

  • 2 In our preliminary analyses, we also assessed the effect of including the most frequent bigrams as (...)

9To assess the influence of including structural features over simply using the most frequent words (lemmata), we used two sets of features (each consisting of about 200 features). The first set of features (taken as the baseline) corresponds to the relative frequency of the 200 top-most frequent words (henceforth referred to as the tw200 set).2 The second set combines token-based and structural features: i.e. in addition to the relative frequency of the 100 top-most frequent words, it contains the (90) structural features illustrated above and detailed in Table 1 (this set is henceforth referred to as the lingtw set). To guarantee comparability of values, for each feature the values were scaled between 0 and 1 on the basis of the data from the training set. If a (non-scaled) feature value in the held-out test set exceeded the maximum non-scaled value of that feature in the training set, it was set to the maximum value (1).

10The feature ranking for each genre was obtained using grafting on the full training data set. The performance (i.e. the percentage of correctly classified documents) of the algorithm was evaluated for an increasing number of features (starting from including only the first (best) feature for each genre to including all features for each genre) against both a 10-fold cross-validation test set and a held-out test set.

11The 10-fold cross-validation procedure was performed on the basis of the training set (i.e. the feature weights were determined on the basis of 90% of the training data, whereas the performance was evaluated on the remaining 10% of the training data; this procedure was repeated 10 times). As stated before, the genre of the document in the test set was assigned to the genre whose binary classification model (in this case with the same number of features) resulted in the highest score.

12The classification accuracy was assessed with respect to the held-out test set for different numbers of features: i) the number of features associated with the best performance on the cross validation set, and ii) the lowest number of features such that the performance dropped when a new feature was added (i.e. performance kept increasing for each additional feature up to the selected number of features).

Table 1: Typology of features automatically extracted from linguistically annotated texts.

Typology

Feature

Raw Text

Sentence and token length

Lexical

Rate of words in the Basic Italian Vocabulary, Type/Token ratio

Morpho-syntactic

Part-Of-Speech unigrams, Lexical density, Verbal mood

Syntactic

Dependency type unigrams, Parse tree depth features, Arity of verbal predicates, Distribution of subordinate vs main clauses, Length of dependency links

4.2 Replication

13Results reported below can be replicated by downloading the docker image italianlp-wieling/dockergenreclas sification which contains all data and scripts necessary for the feature extraction and the grafting procedure, and also contains all results. The Docker file including all commands to setup the virtual machine can be found at https://github.com/​italianlpwieling/​dockergenreclassification.

5 Results

5.1 Genre Classification Results

14Figures 1(a) and 1(b) report the classification results using the lingtw vs tw200 features sets: it can be clearly observed that inclusion of structural features is highly beneficial. With only 10 features, the 10-fold cross validation performance is 83.89% for the lingtw set, whereas it is only 71.51% for the tw200 set. The optimal performance for the lingtw set is reached with 106 features (89.72%), whereas a significantly lower performance is reached using the tw200 set (84.17%) despite the much higher number of features used (179). The performance on the held-out test set turned out to be slightly lower: 79.16% for 10 features using the lingtw set, against 59.16% with the tw200 set. The optimal performance for the lingtw set is reached with 80 features (86.66%), whereas for the tw200 set a lower performance (72.08%) is obtained using 133 features.

Table 2: Percentage distribution of different typologies of ranked syntactic (S), morpho-syntactic (P), lexical (L), raw-text (R) and token-based (W) features selected via GRAFTING on the held-out test set.

Genre

First 10 features

First 50 features

First 80 features

S

P

L

R

W

S

P

L

R

W

S

P

L

R

W

Journalism

30

40

30

0

0

40

38

10

0

12

38.75

28.75

6.25

1.25

25

Literature

40

30

20

0

10

34

28

8

2

28

33.75

26.25

6.25

1.25

32.50

Education

50

20

10

20

0

44

32

6

4

14

42.5

30

5

2.5

20

Science

60

10

20

10

0

50

32

10

4

4

42.5

30

6.25

2.5

18.75

Figure 1: Genre classification results using a held-out test set (a), and a 10-fold cross-validation procedure (b).

Figure 1: Genre classification results using a held-out test set (a), and a 10-fold cross-validation procedure (b).

5.2 Feature Ranking Results

15In order to investigate the typology of linguistic features most significantly contributing to AGC we focused on the lingtw set. In particular, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the grafting-based feature ranking resulting from the classification of the held-out test set. Ranked features were categorized into five classes: syntactic, morpho-syntactic, lexical, raw and token-based features. Figure 2 provides a genre-independent view reporting the percentage average distribution (across genres) of different feature types within the first 10, 50 and 80 ranked feature sets. As shown, syntactic features play the most relevant role. They cover the 45% and 42% of the first 10 and 50 features respectively, and remain the most predictive ones also when 80 features are considered (representing 39.38% of the set). On the other hand, the distribution of token-based features increases as far as a wider amount of ranked features is considered (they cover 2.5%, 14.5% and 24.06% in the 10, 50 and 80 feature sets respectively).

16Consider now the distribution of different types of features across genres reported in Table 2: no- table differences can be observed. In particular, Literature and Scientific prose represent two opposite poles. Token-based features (W) are more predictive for literary texts with respect to other genres (i.e. they represent 10%, 28% and 32.50% in the top 10, 50 and 80 features respectively). On the contrary, syntactic features (S) play for Scientific prose a more important role than for the other genres (covering respectively 60%, 50% and 42.50% of the top 10, 50 and 80 features).

Figure 2: Genre-independent average distribution of different feature types in the top 10, 50 and 80 ranked sets

Figure 2: Genre-independent average distribution of different feature types in the top 10, 50 and 80 ranked sets

Table 3: Different ranking positions of a selection of features across genres. Features which were not selected during ranking have no specified rank in the table.

Journalism

Literature

Education

Science

Sentence length

-

82

6

32

Word length

56

50

3

3

Type/Token Ratio (forms)

3

95

94

4

Parse tree depth

11

3

37

94

Maximum length of dependency links

42

24

48

56

Post-verbal subject

16

22

90

76

Pre-verbal object

31

21

47

42

Passive subject

7

53

17

5

17Let’s focus now on the role played by individual features across genres. Table 3 reports the different rank positions associated with a selection of features in the classification of the four genres. Raw text features (i.e. sentence and word length) resulted to play a key role in the classification of educational materials (Education) with respect to the other genres (e.g. Literature). A feature capturing the lexical richness of texts such as Type/Token Ratio (TTR), which refers to the ratio between the number of lexical types and the number of tokens (considered as single forms) within a text, is similarly ranked for Journalism and Science while it plays a less relevant role in the classification of educational material and literary texts. Moving to syntax, it should be noted that two features characterizing the overall sentence structure, i.e. the depth of the whole parse tree (calculated in terms of the longest path from the root of the dependency tree to some leaf) and the maximum length of dependency links (calculated in terms of the words occurring between the syntactic head and the dependent), play a key role in the classification of the Literature and Journalism genres. For the latter, it is interesting to contrast the high rank associated with the parse tree depth feature and the irrelevant role played by sentence length (typically taken as a proxy of the underlying grammatical structure): this clearly shows that syntactic features are more effective in discriminating genres. Other features which turned out to play a relevant role in ACG are concerned with the relative ordering of subject and object with respect to the verbal head: their non-canonical orders, i.e. postverbal subject and pre-verbal object, play a key role in the classification of Literature and Journalism genres. On the contrary, the use of passive voice (inferred from the presence of passive subjects) is less relevant for the classification of Literature, whereas it is highly ranked in the characterization of scientific writing and newspaper articles.

6 Conclusion

18In this paper we investigated impact and role of different feature types for Automatic Genre Classification. The goal was pursued by carrying out incremental feature selection through Grafting augmented with TinyEst. Two sets of features were taken into account, token-based and structure-based. Achieved results show the key role played by syntactic features, a result which is new with respect to the AGC literature. Another original contribution is concerned with the role of different feature types which turned out to vary across textual genres, suggesting the specialization of features in binary genre classification tasks (e.g. Literature vs. other genres). The features contributing to AGC for Italian are possibly influenced by the language dealt with. Although it is widely acknowledged that linguistic variation across genres is a language universal, the question is whether similar linguistic features are expected to play a similar role across languages. If this might be the case of features such as e.g. TTR, use of passive voice, tenses or pronouns, on the other hand features concerned with the ordering of sentence constituents or the overall sentence structure (e.g. parse tree depth or dependency length) may be distinctive to a specific language or language family. Further directions of research thus include comparison of results in a multilingual perspective as well as across a wider variety of genres.

Acknowledgements

19Reported research started in the framework of a Short Term Mobility program of international exchanges funded by CNR, and continued within the project “Smart News, Social sensing for breakingnews”, funded by the Tuscany Region under the FAR-FAS 2014 program.

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Notes

1 http://github.com/danieldk/tinyest

2 In our preliminary analyses, we also assessed the effect of including the most frequent bigrams as features. However, as the performance was similar to only using unigrams, we did not include bigrams as features.

Auteurs

Andrea Cimino

Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC–CNR) ItaliaNLP Lab - www.italianlp.itandrea.cimino@ilc.cnr.it

Martijn Wieling

University of Groningen – The Netherlands –m.b.wieling@rug.nl

Felice Dell’Orletta

Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC–CNR) ItaliaNLP Lab - www.italianlp.itfelice.dellorletta@ilc.cnr.it

Simonetta Montemagni

Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC–CNR) ItaliaNLP Lab - www.italianlp.itsimonetta.montemagni@ilc.cnr.it

Giulia Venturi

Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC–CNR) ItaliaNLP Lab - www.italianlp.itgiulia.venturi@ilc.cnr.it