Fast Sentence Classification using Word Co-occurrence Graphs*

We consider a supervised classification problem of categorizing e-commerce products based on just the words in the title. If done in real-time, the categorization can greatly benefit sellers by enabling them to offer immediate feedback. We present a deterministic algorithm by constructing weighted word co-occurrence graphs from the listing/item titles. We empirically evaluate this algorithm on two publicly available product listing datasets, Etsy and Amazon. Our method’s accuracy is comparable to that of a supervised classifier constructed using the fastText library. The inference time of our model is up to 2.9× faster than the fastText classifier and has small training times. The training and inference of our model scales well for big datasets performing large-scale classification on millions of listings. We perform a detailed analysis and provide insights into our method and the product categorization task.