Natural language contents evaluation system for multi-class news categorization using machine learning and transformers

Abstract

The exponential growth of digital documents has come with rapid progress in text classification techniques in recent years. This paper provides text classification models, which analyze various steps of news classification, where some algorithmic approaches for machine learning, such as Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest, are implemented. In turn, the uses of Transformers as classification models for the solution of the same problem, proposing BERT and DistilBERT as possible solutions to compare for the automatic classification of news containing articles belonging to four categories (World, Sports, Business, and Science/Technology). We obtained the highest accuracy on the machine learning side, with 88% using Support Vector Machine with Word2Vec. However, using Transformer DistilBERT, we got an efficient model in terms of performance and 91.7% accuracy for classifying news.