14-line code can be used to 'understand' similarities between sentences

This is interesting, but why don’t they link to the paper? Or at least give its title?

The paper is «“Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors»:

ACL Anthology, has PDF link: https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.426/

Arxiv, has PDF link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09410

arXiv Vanity, HTML render of it: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2212.09410/

ResearchGate, has PDF link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366423949_Less_is_M...

This is Listing 1: ”Python Code for Text Classification with gzip.”

    import gzip
    import numpy as np
    for (x1, _) in test_set:
        Cx1 = len(gzip.compress(x1.encode()))
        distance_from_x1 = []
        for (x2, _) in training_set:
            Cx2 = len(gzip.compress(x2.encode())
            x1x2 = " ".join([x1, x2])
            Cx1x2 = len(gzip.compress(x1x2.encode())
            ncd = (Cx1x2 - min(Cx1,Cx2)) / max(Cx1, Cx2)
            distance_from_x1.append(ncd)
        sorted_idx = np.argsort(np.array(distance_from_x1))
        top_k_class = training_set[sorted_idx[:k], 1]
        predict_class = max(set(top_k_class), key=top_k_class.count)

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a non-parametric alternative to DNNs that’s easy, lightweight, and universal in text classification: a combi- nation of a simple compressor like gzip with a k-nearest-neighbor classifier. Without any training parameters, our method achieves re- sults that are competitive with non-pretrained deep learning methods on six in-distribution datasets. It even outperforms BERT on all five OOD datasets, including four low-resource lan- guages. Our method also excels in the few-shot setting, where labeled data are too scarce to train DNNs effectively. Code is available at https://github.com/bazingagin/npc_gzip

Ah, this was already mentioned a few days ago in HN:

73 comments: “Gzip and KNN Outperforms Transformers on Text Classification” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36707193

7 comments: “Plain old gzip+kNN outperforms BERT and other DNNs” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36705472

7 comments: “A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36707509