Mistake-Driven Learning in Text Categorization

Learning problems in the text processing domain often map the text to a space whose dimensions are the measured features of the text, e.g., its words. Three characteristic properties of this domain are (a) very high dimensionality, (b) both the learned concepts and the instances reside very sparsely in the feature space, and (c) a high variation in the number of active features in an instance. In this work we study three mistake-driven learning algorithms for a typical task of this nature -- text categorization. We argue that these algorithms -- which categorize documents by learning a linear separator in the feature space -- have a few properties that make them ideal for this domain. We then show that a quantum leap in performance is achieved when we further modify the algorithms to better address some of the specific characteristics of the domain. In particular, we demonstrate (1) how variation in document length can be tolerated by either normalizing feature weights or by using negative weights, (2) the positive effect of applying a threshold range in training, (3) alternatives in considering feature frequency, and (4) the benefits of discarding features while training. Overall, we present an algorithm, a variation of Littlestone's Winnow, which performs significantly better than any other algorithm tested on this task using a similar feature set.Comment: 9 pages, uses aclap.st

Neural Discourse Structure for Text Categorization

We show that discourse structure, as defined by Rhetorical Structure Theory and provided by an existing discourse parser, benefits text categorization. Our approach uses a recursive neural network and a newly proposed attention mechanism to compute a representation of the text that focuses on salient content, from the perspective of both RST and the task. Experiments consider variants of the approach and illustrate its strengths and weaknesses.Comment: ACL 2017 camera ready versio

Using bag-of-concepts to improve the performance of support vector machines in text categorization

This paper investigates the use of concept-based representations for text categorization. We introduce a new approach to create concept-based text representations, and apply it to a standard text categorization collection. The representations are used as input to a Support Vector Machine classifier, and the results show that there are certain categories for which concept-based representations constitute a viable supplement to word-based ones. We also demonstrate how the performance of the Support Vector Machine can be improved by combining representations

Non-Standard Words as Features for Text Categorization

This paper presents categorization of Croatian texts using Non-Standard Words (NSW) as features. Non-Standard Words are: numbers, dates, acronyms, abbreviations, currency, etc. NSWs in Croatian language are determined according to Croatian NSW taxonomy. For the purpose of this research, 390 text documents were collected and formed the SKIPEZ collection with 6 classes: official, literary, informative, popular, educational and scientific. Text categorization experiment was conducted on three different representations of the SKIPEZ collection: in the first representation, the frequencies of NSWs are used as features; in the second representation, the statistic measures of NSWs (variance, coefficient of variation, standard deviation, etc.) are used as features; while the third representation combines the first two feature sets. Naive Bayes, CN2, C4.5, kNN, Classification Trees and Random Forest algorithms were used in text categorization experiments. The best categorization results are achieved using the first feature set (NSW frequencies) with the categorization accuracy of 87%. This suggests that the NSWs should be considered as features in highly inflectional languages, such as Croatian. NSW based features reduce the dimensionality of the feature space without standard lemmatization procedures, and therefore the bag-of-NSWs should be considered for further Croatian texts categorization experiments.Comment: IEEE 37th International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO 2014), pp. 1415-1419, 201