Several Approaches for Tweet Topic Classification in COSET - IberEval 2017

These working notes summarize the different approaches we have explored in order to classify a corpus of tweets related to the 2015 Spanish General Election (COSET 2017 task from IberEval 2017). Two approaches were tested during the COSET 2017 evaluations: Neural Networks with Sentence Embeddings (based on TensorFlow) and N-gram Language Models (based on SRILM). Our results with these approaches were modest: both ranked above the “Most frequent baseline”, but below the “Bag-of-words + SVM” baseline. A third approach was tried after the COSET 2017 evaluation phase was over: Advanced Linear Models (based on fastText). Results measured over the COSET 2017 Dev and Test show that this approach is well above the “TF-IDF+RF” baseline.