What my first Silver Medal taught me about Text Classification and Kaggle in general?

Kaggle is an excellent place for learning. And I learned a lot of things from the recently concluded competition on Quora Insincere questions classification in which I got a rank of 182/4037. In this post, I will try to provide a summary of the things I tried. I will also try to summarize the ideas which I missed but were a part of other winning solutions.

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So first a little bit of summary about the competition for the uninitiated. In this competition, we had to develop models that identify and flag insincere questions. The challenge was not only a test for performance but also a test of efficient code writing skills. As it was a kernel …