PySS3: A Python package implementing a novel text classifier with visualization tools for Explainable AI

TL;DR

PySS3 is an open-source Python package that implements the SS3 text classifier, providing visualization tools for explainability and supporting incremental training, aiming to enhance robust and trustworthy text classification.

Contribution

This work introduces PySS3, an open-source implementation of SS3 with visualization tools, expanding its use as a general, explainable text classifier.

Findings

State-of-the-art performance on eRisk tasks

Supports incremental training and classification

Provides visualization tools for explainability

Abstract

A recently introduced text classifier, called SS3, has obtained state-of-the-art performance on the CLEF's eRisk tasks. SS3 was created to deal with risk detection over text streams and, therefore, not only supports incremental training and classification but also can visually explain its rationale. However, little attention has been paid to the potential use of SS3 as a general classifier. We believe this could be due to the unavailability of an open-source implementation of SS3. In this work, we introduce PySS3, a package that implements SS3 and also comes with visualization tools that allow researchers to deploy robust, explainable, and trusty machine learning models for text classification.