Two-Level Text Classification Using Hybrid Machine Learning Techniques

Nowadays, documents are increasingly being associated with multi-level category hierarchies rather than a flat category scheme. To access these documents in real time, we need fast automatic methods to navigate these hierarchies. Today’s vast data repositories such as the web also contain many broad domains of data which are quite distinct from each other e.g. medicine, education, sports and politics. Each domain constitutes a subspace of the data within which the documents are similar to each other but quite distinct from the documents in another subspace. The data within these domains is frequently further divided into many subcategories. Subspace Learning is a technique popular with non-text domains such as image recognition to increase speed and accuracy. Subspace analysis lends itself naturally to the idea of hybrid classifiers. Each subspace can be processed by a classifier best suited to the characteristics of that particular subspace. Instead of using the complete set of full space feature dimensions, classifier performances can be boosted by using only a subset of the dimensions. This thesis presents a novel hybrid parallel architecture using separate classifiers trained on separate subspaces to improve two-level text classification. The classifier to be used on a particular input and the relevant feature subset to be extracted is determined dynamically by using a novel method based on the maximum significance value. A novel vector representation which enhances the distinction between classes within the subspace is also developed. This novel system, the Hybrid Parallel Classifier, was compared against the baselines of several single classifiers such as the Multilayer Perceptron and was found to be faster and have higher two-level classification accuracies. The improvement in performance achieved was even higher when dealing with more complex category hierarchies

Cross-Lingual Adaptation using Structural Correspondence Learning

Cross-lingual adaptation, a special case of domain adaptation, refers to the transfer of classification knowledge between two languages. In this article we describe an extension of Structural Correspondence Learning (SCL), a recently proposed algorithm for domain adaptation, for cross-lingual adaptation. The proposed method uses unlabeled documents from both languages, along with a word translation oracle, to induce cross-lingual feature correspondences. From these correspondences a cross-lingual representation is created that enables the transfer of classification knowledge from the source to the target language. The main advantages of this approach over other approaches are its resource efficiency and task specificity. We conduct experiments in the area of cross-language topic and sentiment classification involving English as source language and German, French, and Japanese as target languages. The results show a significant improvement of the proposed method over a machine translation baseline, reducing the relative error due to cross-lingual adaptation by an average of 30% (topic classification) and 59% (sentiment classification). We further report on empirical analyses that reveal insights into the use of unlabeled data, the sensitivity with respect to important hyperparameters, and the nature of the induced cross-lingual correspondences

Uncovering Meanings of Embeddings via Partial Orthogonality

Machine learning tools often rely on embedding text as vectors of real numbers. In this paper, we study how the semantic structure of language is encoded in the algebraic structure of such embeddings. Specifically, we look at a notion of ``semantic independence'' capturing the idea that, e.g., ``eggplant'' and ``tomato'' are independent given ``vegetable''. Although such examples are intuitive, it is difficult to formalize such a notion of semantic independence. The key observation here is that any sensible formalization should obey a set of so-called independence axioms, and thus any algebraic encoding of this structure should also obey these axioms. This leads us naturally to use partial orthogonality as the relevant algebraic structure. We develop theory and methods that allow us to demonstrate that partial orthogonality does indeed capture semantic independence. Complementary to this, we also introduce the concept of independence preserving embeddings where embeddings preserve the conditional independence structures of a distribution, and we prove the existence of such embeddings and approximations to them