  Short text classification is one of important tasks in Natural Language
Processing (NLP). Unlike paragraphs or documents, short texts are more
ambiguous since they have not enough contextual information, which poses a
great challenge for classification. In this paper, we retrieve knowledge from
external knowledge source to enhance the semantic representation of short
texts. We take conceptual information as a kind of knowledge and incorporate it
into deep neural networks. For the purpose of measuring the importance of
knowledge, we introduce attention mechanisms and propose deep Short Text
Classification with Knowledge powered Attention (STCKA). We utilize Concept
towards Short Text (C- ST) attention and Concept towards Concept Set (C-CS)
attention to acquire the weight of concepts from two aspects. And we classify a
short text with the help of conceptual information. Unlike traditional
approaches, our model acts like a human being who has intrinsic ability to make
decisions based on observation (i.e., training data for machines) and pays more
attention to important knowledge. We also conduct extensive experiments on four
public datasets for different tasks. The experimental results and case studies
show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, justifying the
effectiveness of knowledge powered attention.
