Machine Learning in Automated Text Categorization

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 manpower, 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.Comment: Accepted for publication on ACM Computing Survey

KACST Arabic Text Classification Project: Overview and Preliminary Results

Electronically formatted Arabic free-texts can be found in abundance these days on the World Wide Web, often linked to commercial enterprises and/or government organizations. Vast tracts of knowledge and relations lie hidden within these texts, knowledge that can be exploited once the correct intelligent tools have been identified and applied. For example, text mining may help with text classification and categorization. Text classification aims to automatically assign text to a predefined category based on identifiable linguistic features. Such a process has different useful applications including, but not restricted to, E-Mail spam detection, web pages content filtering, and automatic message routing. In this paper an overview of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) Arabic Text Classification Project will be illustrated along with some preliminary results. This project will contribute to the better understanding and elaboration of Arabic text classification techniques

A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization

Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web. Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step. However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods