Hierarchy is a common and effective way of organizing data and representing
their relationships at different levels of abstraction. However, hierarchical
data dependencies cause difficulties in the estimation of "separable" models
that can distinguish between the entities in the hierarchy. Extracting
separable models of hierarchical entities requires us to take their relative
position into account and to consider the different types of dependencies in
the hierarchy. In this paper, we present an investigation of the effect of
separability in text-based entity classification and argue that in hierarchical
classification, a separation property should be established between entities
not only in the same layer, but also in different layers. Our main findings are
the followings. First, we analyse the importance of separability on the data
representation in the task of classification and based on that, we introduce a
"Strong Separation Principle" for optimizing expected effectiveness of
classifiers decision based on separation property. Second, we present
Hierarchical Significant Words Language Models (HSWLM) which capture all, and
only, the essential features of hierarchical entities according to their
relative position in the hierarchy resulting in horizontally and vertically
separable models. Third, we validate our claims on real-world data and
demonstrate that how HSWLM improves the accuracy of classification and how it
provides transferable models over time. Although discussions in this paper
focus on the classification problem, the models are applicable to any
information access tasks on data that has, or can be mapped to, a hierarchical
structure.Comment: Full paper (10 pages) accepted for publication in proceedings of ACM
SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval
(ICTIR'16