Effectiveness of Self Normalizing Neural Networks for Text Classification

Self Normalizing Neural Networks(SNN) proposed on Feed Forward Neural Networks(FNN) outperform regular FNN architectures in various machine learning tasks. Particularly in the domain of Computer Vision, the activation function Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU) proposed for SNNs, perform better than other non linear activations such as ReLU. The goal of SNN is to produce a normalized output for a normalized input. Established neural network architectures like feed forward networks and Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) lack the intrinsic nature of normalizing outputs. Hence, requiring additional layers such as Batch Normalization. Despite the success of SNNs, their characteristic features on other network architectures like CNN haven't been explored, especially in the domain of Natural Language Processing. In this paper we aim to show the effectiveness of proposed, Self Normalizing Convolutional Neural Networks(SCNN) on text classification. We analyze their performance with the standard CNN architecture used on several text classification datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that SCNN achieves comparable results to standard CNN model with significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore it also outperforms CNN with equal number of parameters.