The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last ten years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert labor power, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.

Reuters Corpus Volume I (RCV1) is an archive of over 800,000 manually categorized newswire stories recently made available by Reuters, Ltd. for research purposes. Use of this data for research on text categorization requires a detailed understanding of the real world constraints under which the data was produced. Drawing on interviews with Reuters personnel and access to Reuters documentation, we describe the coding policy and quality control procedures used in producing the RCV1 data, the intended semantics of the hierarchical category taxonomies, and the corrections necessary to remove errorful data. We refer to the original data as RCV1-v1, and the corrected data as RCV1-v2. We benchmark several widely used supervised learning methods on RCV1-v2, illustrating the collection’s properties, suggesting new directions for research, and providing baseline results for future studies. We make available detailed, per-category experimental results, as well as

sdumais @ microsoft.com This paper explores the use of hierarchical structure for classifying a large, heterogeneous collection of web content. The hierarchical structure is initially used to train different second-level classifiers. In the hierarchical case, a model is learned to distinguish a second-level category from other categories within the same top level. In the flat non-hierarchical case, a model distinguishes a second-level category from all other second-level categories. Scoring rules can further take advantage of the hierarchy by considering only second-level categories that exceed a threshold at the top level. We use support vector machine (SVM) classifiers, which have been shown to be efficient and effective for classification, but not previously explored in the context of hierarchical classification. We found small advantages in accuracy for hierarchical models over flat models. For the hierarchical approach, we found the same accuracy using a sequential Boolean decision rule and a multiplicative decision rule. Since the sequential approach is much more efficient, requiring only 14%-16 % of the comparisons used in the other approaches, we find it to be a good choice for classifying text into large hierarchical structures.

Machine learning for text classification is the cornerstone of document categorization, news filtering, document routing, and personalization. In text domains, effective feature selection is essential to make the learning task efficient and more accurate. This paper presents an empirical comparison of twelve feature selection methods (e.g. Information Gain) evaluated on a benchmark of 229 text classification problem instances that were gathered from Reuters, TREC, OHSUMED, etc. The results are analyzed from multiple goal perspectives—accuracy, F-measure, precision, and recall—since each is appropriate in different situations. The results reveal that a new feature selection metric we call ‘Bi-Normal Separation ’ (BNS), outperformed the others by a substantial margin in most situations. This margin widened in tasks with high class skew, which is rampant in text classification problems and is particularly challenging for induction algorithms. A new evaluation methodology is offered that focuses on the needs of the data mining practitioner faced with a single dataset who seeks to choose one (or a pair of) metrics that are most likely to yield the best performance. From this perspective, BNS was the top single choice for all goals except precision, for which Information Gain yielded the best result most often. This analysis also revealed, for example, that Information Gain and Chi-Squared have correlated failures, and so they work poorly together. When choosing optimal pairs of metrics for each of the four performance goals, BNS is consistently a member of the pair—e.g., for greatest recall, the pair BNS + F1-measure yielded the best performance on the greatest number of tasks by a considerable margin.

We investigate the use of dimensionality reduction to improve performance for a new class of data analysis software called "recommender systems". Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making product recommendations during a live customer interaction. These systems are achieving widespread success in E-commerce nowadays, especially with the advent of the Internet. The tremendous growth of customers and products poses three key challenges for recommender systems in the E-commerce domain. These are: producing high quality recommendations, performing many recommendations per second for millions of customers and products, and achieving high coverage in the face of data sparsity. One successful recommender system technology is collaborative filtering , which works by matching customer preferences to other customers in making recommendations. Collaborative filtering has been shown to produce high quality recommendations, but the performance degrades with ...

High dimensionality of text can be a deterrent in applying complex learners such as Support Vector Machines to the task of text classification. Feature clustering is a powerful alternative to feature selection for reducing the dimensionality of text data. In this paper we propose a new informationtheoretic divisive algorithm for feature/word clustering and apply it to text classification. Existing techniques for such “distributional clustering ” of words are agglomerative in nature and result in (i) sub-optimal word clusters and (ii) high computational cost. In order to explicitly capture the optimality of word clusters in an information theoretic framework, we first derive a global criterion for feature clustering. We then present a fast, divisive algorithm that monotonically decreases this objective function value. We show that our algorithm minimizes the “within-cluster Jensen-Shannon divergence ” while simultaneously maximizing the “between-cluster Jensen-Shannon divergence”. In comparison to the previously proposed agglomerative strategies our divisive algorithm is much faster and achieves comparable or higher classification accuracies. We further show that feature clustering is an effective technique for building smaller class models in hierarchical classification. We present detailed experimental results using Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines on the 20Newsgroups data set and a 3-level hierarchy of HTML documents collected from the Open Directory project (www.dmoz.org).

Naive Bayes is often used as a baseline in text classification because it is fast and easy to implement. Its severe assumptions make such efficiency possible but also adversely affect the quality of its results. In this paper we propose simple, heuristic solutions to some of the problems with Naive Bayes classifiers, addressing both systemic issues as well as problems that arise because text is not actually generated according to a multinomial model.

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in the amount of experimental and computational biomedical data, specifically in the areas of Genomics and Proteomics. This growth is accompanied by an accelerated increase in the number of biomedical publications discussing the findings. In the last few years there is a lot of interest within the scientific community in literature-mining tools to help sort through this abundance of literature, and find the nuggets of information most relevant and useful for specific analysis tasks. This paper

. In this paper we present a simple linear-time centroid-based document classification algorithm, that despite its simplicity and robust performance, has not been extensively studied and analyzed. Our experiments show that this centroid-based classifier consistently and substantially outperforms other algorithms such as Naive Bayesian, k-nearest-neighbors, and C4.5, on a wide range of datasets. Our analysis shows that the similarity measure used by the centroidbased scheme allows it to classify a new document based on how closely its behavior matches the behavior of the documents belonging to different classes. This matching allows it to dynamically adjust for classes with different densities and accounts for dependencies between the terms in the different classes. 1 Introduction We have seen a tremendous growth in the volume of online text documents available on the Internet, digital libraries, news sources, and company-wide intranets. It has been forecasted that these docu...

This paper describes a set of comparative experiments for the problem of automatically ltering unwanted electronic mail messages. Several variants of the AdaBoost algorithm with con dence{ rated predictions (Schapire & Singer 99) have been applied, which di er in the complexity of the base learners considered. Two main conclusions can be drawn from our experiments: a) The boosting{based methods clearly outperform the baseline learning algorithms (Naive Bayes and Induction of Decision Trees) on the PU1 corpus, achieving very high levels of the F1 measure � b) Increasing the complexity of the base learners allows to obtain better \high{precision " classi ers, which isavery important issue when misclassication costs are considered. 1