Word co-occurrence features for text classification

In this article we propose a data treatment strategy to generate new discriminative features, called compound-features (or c-features), for the sake of text classification. These c-features are composed by terms that co-occur in documents without any restrictions on order or distance between terms within a document. This strategy precedes the classification task, in order to enhance documents with discriminative c-features. The idea is that, when c-features are used in conjunction with single-features, the ambiguity and noise inherent to their bag-of-words representation are reduced. We use c-features composed of two terms in order to make their usage computationally feasible while improving the classifier effectiveness. We test this approach with several classification algorithms and single-label multi-class text collections. Experimental results demonstrated gains in almost all evaluated scenarios, from the simplest algorithms such as kNN (13% gain in micro-average F₁ in the 20 Newsgroups collection) to the most complex one, the state-of-the-art SVM (10% gain in macro-average F₁ in the collection OHSUMED).     

Discriminative features for text document classification

Abstract The bag-of-words approach to text document representation typically results in vectors of the order of 5000–20,000 components as the representation of documents. To make effective use of various statistical classifiers, it may be necessary to reduce the dimensionality of this representation. We point out deficiencies in class discrimination of two popular such methods, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), and sequential feature selection according to some relevant criterion. As a remedy, we suggest feature transforms based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Since LDA requires operating both with large and dense matrices, we propose an efficient intermediate dimension reduction step using either a random transform or LSI. We report good classification results with the combined feature transform on a subset of the Reuters-21578 database. Drastic reduction of the feature vector dimensionality from 5000 to 12 actually improves the classification performance.An erratum to this article can be found at     

Boosting text segmentation via progressive classification

A novel approach for reconciling tuples stored as free text into an existing attribute schema is proposed. The basic idea is to subject the available text to progressive classification, i.e., a multi-stage classification scheme where, at each intermediate stage, a classifier is learnt that analyzes the textual fragments not reconciled at the end of the previous steps. Classification is accomplished by an ad hoc exploitation of traditional association mining algorithms, and is supported by a data transformation scheme which takes advantage of domain-specific dictionaries/ontologies. A key feature is the capability of progressively enriching the available ontology with the results of the previous stages of classification, thus significantly improving the overall classification accuracy. An extensive experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of our approach.     

Selection criteria for text mining approaches

Text mining techniques include categorization of text, summarization, topic detection, concept extraction, search and retrieval, document clustering, etc. Each of these techniques can be used in finding some non-trivial information from a collection of documents. Text mining can also be employed to detect a document’s main topic/theme which is useful in creating taxonomy from the document collection. Areas of applications for text mining include publishing, media, telecommunications, marketing, research, healthcare, medicine, etc. Text mining has also been applied on many applications on the World Wide Web for developing recommendation systems. We propose here a set of criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of text mining techniques in an attempt to facilitate the selection of appropriate technique.     

Using text classification and multiple concepts to answer e-mails

In text mining, the applications domain of text classification techniques is very broad to include text filtering, word identification, and web page classification, etc. Through text classification techniques, documents can be placed into previously defined classifications in order to save on time costs especially when manual document search methods are employed. This research uses text classification techniques applied to e-mail reply template suggestions in order to lower the burden of customer service personnel in responding to e-mails. Suggested templates allows customer service personnel, using a pre-determined number of templates, to find the needed reply template, and not waste time in searching for relevant answers from too much information available. Current text classification techniques are still single-concept based. This research hopes to use a multiple concept method to integrate the relationship between concepts and classifications which will thus allow easy text classification. Through integration of different concepts and classifications, a dynamically unified e-mail concept can recommend different appropriate reply templates. In so doing, the differences between e-mails can be definitely determined, effectively improving the accuracy of the suggested template. In addition, for e-mails with two or more questions, this research tries to come up with an appropriate reply template. Based on experimental verification, the method proposed in this research effectively proposes a template for e-mails of multiple questions. Therefore, using multiple concepts to display the document topic is definitely a clearer way of extracting information that a document wants to convey when the vector of similar documents is used.     

Textual data mining for industrial knowledge management and text classification: A business oriented approach

Textual databases are useful sources of information and knowledge and if these are well utilised then issues related to future project management and product or service quality improvement may be resolved. A large part of corporate information, approximately 80%, is available in textual data formats. Text Classification techniques are well known for managing on-line sources of digital documents. The identification of key issues discussed within textual data and their classification into two different classes could help decision makers or knowledge workers to manage their future activities better. This research is relevant for most text based documents and is demonstrated on Post Project Reviews (PPRs) which are valuable source of information and knowledge. The application of textual data mining techniques for discovering useful knowledge and classifying textual data into different classes is a relatively new area of research. The research work presented in this paper is focused on the use of hybrid applications of text mining or textual data mining techniques to classify textual data into two different classes. The research applies clustering techniques at the first stage and Apriori Association Rule Mining at the second stage. The Apriori Association Rule of Mining is applied to generate Multiple Key Term Phrasal Knowledge Sequences (MKTPKS) which are later used for classification. Additionally, studies were made to improve the classification accuracies of the classifiers i.e. C4.5, K-NN, Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The classification accuracies were measured and the results compared with those of a single term based classification model. The methodology proposed could be used to analyse any free formatted textual data and in the current research it has been demonstrated on an industrial dataset consisting of Post Project Reviews (PPRs) collected from the construction industry. The data or information available in these reviews is codified in multiple different formats but in the current research scenario only free formatted text documents are examined. Experiments showed that the performance of classifiers improved through adopting the proposed methodology.     

Discovery of hierarchical thematic structure in text collections with adaptive resonance theory

This paper investigates the abilities of adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural networks as miners of hierarchical thematic structure in text collections. We present experimental results with binary ART1 on the benchmark Reuter-21578 corpus. Using both quantitative evaluation with the standard F ₁ measure and qualitative visualization of the hierarchy obtained with ART, we discuss how useful ART built hierarchies would be to a user intending to use it as a means to find and access textual information. Our F ₁ results show that ART1 produces hierarchical clustering that exhibit a quality exceeding k-means and a hierarchical clustering algorithm. However, we identify several critical problem areas that would make it rather impractical to actually use such a hierarchy in a real-life environment. These predicaments point to the importance of semantic feature selection. Our main contribution is to test in details the applicability of ART to the important domain of hierarchical document clustering, an application of Adaptive Resonance that had received little attention until now.

Converting numerical classification into text classification

Consider a supervised learning problem in which examples contain both numerical- and text-valued features. To use traditional feature-vector-based learning methods, one could treat the presence or absence of a word as a Boolean feature and use these binary-valued features together with the numerical features. However, the use of a text-classification system on this is a bit more problematic—in the most straight-forward approach each number would be considered a distinct token and treated as a word. This paper presents an alternative approach for the use of text classification methods for supervised learning problems with numerical-valued features in which the numerical features are converted into bag-of-words features, thereby making them directly usable by text classification methods. We show that even on purely numerical-valued data the results of text classification on the derived text-like representation outperforms the more naive numbers-as-tokens representation and, more importantly, is competitive with mature numerical classification methods such as C4.5, Ripper, and SVM. We further show that on mixed-mode data adding numerical features using our approach can improve performance over not adding those features.     

Efficient classification of multi-labeled text streams by clashing

We present a method for the classification of multi-labeled text documents explicitly designed for data stream applications that require to process a virtually infinite sequence of data using constant memory and constant processing time.Our method is composed of an online procedure used to efficiently map text into a low-dimensional feature space and a partition of this space into a set of regions for which the system extracts and keeps statistics used to predict multi-label text annotations. Documents are fed into the system as a sequence of words, mapped to a region of the partition, and annotated using the statistics computed from the labeled instances colliding in the same region. This approach is referred to as clashing.We illustrate the method in real-world text data, comparing the results with those obtained using other text classifiers. In addition, we provide an analysis about the effect of the representation space dimensionality on the predictive performance of the system. Our results show that the online embedding indeed approximates the geometry of the full corpus-wise TF and TF-IDF space. The model obtains competitive F measures with respect to the most accurate methods, using significantly fewer computational resources. In addition, the method achieves a higher macro-averaged F measure than methods with similar running time. Furthermore, the system is able to learn faster than the other methods from partially labeled streams.     

Iterative generation of insight from text collections through mutually reinforcing visualizations and fuzzy cognitive maps

Developing a comprehensive explanation of complex social phenomena is a difficult task that analysts often have to perform using vast collections of text documents. On the one hand, solutions exist to assist analysts in creating causal maps from text documents, but these can only articulate the relationships at work in a problem. On the other hand, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) can articulate these relationships and perform simulations, but no environment exists to help analysts in iteratively developing FCMs from text. In this paper, we detail the design and implementation of the first tool that allows analysts to develop FCMs from text collections, using interactive visualizations. We make three contributions: (i) we combine text mining and FCMs, (ii) we implement the first visual analytics environment built on FCMs, and (iii) we promote a strong feedback loop between interactive data exploration and model building. We provide two case studies exemplifying how to create a model from the ground-up or improve an existing one. Limitations include the increase in display complexity when working with large collection of files, and the reliance on KL-divergence for ad-hoc retrieval. Several improvements are discussed to further support analysts in creating high-quality models through interactive visualizations.     

Higher order feature selection for text classification

In this paper. we present the MIFS-C variant of the mutual information feature-selection algorithms. We present an algorithm to find the optimal value of the redundancy parameter, which is a key parameter in the MIFS-type algorithms. Furthermore, we present an algorithm that speeds up the execution time of all the MIFS variants. Overall, the presented MIFS-C has comparable classification accuracy (in some cases even better) compared with other MIFS algorithms, while its running time is faster. We compared this feature selector with other feature selectors, and found that it performs better in most cases. The MIFS-C performed especially well for the breakeven and F-measure because the algorithm can be tuned to optimise these evaluation measures. Jan Bakus received the B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and Ph.D. degree in systems design engineering in 2005. He is currently working at Maplesoft, Waterloo, ON, Canada as an applications engineer, where he is responsible for the development of application specific toolboxes for the Maple scientific computing software. His research interests are in the area of feature selection for text classification, text classification, text clustering, and information retrieval. He is the recipient of the Carl Pollock Fellowship award from the University of Waterloo and the Datatel Scholars Foundation scholarship from Datatel. Mohamed S. Kamel holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto, Canada. He is at present Professor and Director of the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada. Professor Kamel holds a Canada Research Chair in Cooperative Intelligent Systems. Dr. Kamel's research interests are in machine intelligence, neural networks and pattern recognition with applications in robotics and manufacturing. He has authored and coauthored over 200 papers in journals and conference proceedings, 2 patents and numerous technical and industrial project reports. Under his supervision, 53 Ph.D. and M.A.Sc. students have completed their degrees. Dr. Kamel is a member of ACM, AAAI, CIPS and APEO and has been named s Fellow of IEEE (2005). He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Robotics and Automation, Associate Editor of the IEEE SMC, Part A, the International Journal of Image and Graphics, Pattern Recognition Letters and is a member of the editorial board of the Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing. He has served as a consultant to many Companies, including NCR, IBM, Nortel, VRP and CSA. He is a member of the board of directors and cofounder of Virtek Vision International in Waterloo.     

Evolutionary instance selection for text classification

Text classification is usually based on constructing a model through learning from training examples to automatically classify text documents. However, as the size of text document repositories grows rapidly, the storage requirement and computational cost of model learning become higher. Instance selection is one solution to solve these limitations whose aim is to reduce the data size by filtering out noisy data from a given training dataset. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for these tasks, namely a biological-based genetic algorithm (BGA). BGA fits a “biological evolution” into the evolutionary process, where the most streamlined process also complies with the reasonable rules. In other words, after long-term evolution, organisms find the most efficient way to allocate resources and evolve. Consequently, we can closely simulate the natural evolution of an algorithm, such that the algorithm will be both efficient and effective. The experimental results based on the TechTC-100 and Reuters-21578 datasets show the outperformance of BGA over five state-of-the-art algorithms. In particular, using BGA to select text documents not only results in the largest dataset reduction rate, but also requires the least computational time. Moreover, BGA can make the k-NN and SVM classifiers provide similar or slightly better classification accuracy than GA.     

Using Wikipedia knowledge to improve text classification

Text classification has been widely used to assist users with the discovery of useful information from the Internet. However, traditional classification methods are based on the “Bag of Words” (BOW) representation, which only accounts for term frequency in the documents, and ignores important semantic relationships between key terms. To overcome this problem, previous work attempted to enrich text representation by means of manual intervention or automatic document expansion. The achieved improvement is unfortunately very limited, due to the poor coverage capability of the dictionary, and to the ineffectiveness of term expansion. In this paper, we automatically construct a thesaurus of concepts from Wikipedia. We then introduce a unified framework to expand the BOW representation with semantic relations (synonymy, hyponymy, and associative relations), and demonstrate its efficacy in enhancing previous approaches for text classification. Experimental results on several data sets show that the proposed approach, integrated with the thesaurus built from Wikipedia, can achieve significant improvements with respect to the baseline algorithm.

A text mining approach to Internet abuse detection

As the use of the Internet in organizations continues to grow, so does Internet abuse in the workplace. Internet abuse activities by employees-such as online chatting, gaming, investing, shopping, illegal downloading, pornography, and cybersex-and online crimes are inflicting severe costs to organizations in terms of productivity losses, resource wasting, security risks, and legal liabilities. Organizations have started to fight back via Internet usage policies, management training, and monitoring. Internet filtering software products are finding an increasing number of adoptions in organizations. These products mainly rely on blacklists, whitelists, and keyword/profile matching. In this paper, we propose a text mining approach to Internet abuse detection. We have empirically compared a variety of term weighting, feature selection, and classification techniques for Internet abuse detection in the workplace of software programmers. The experimental results are very promising; they demonstrate that the proposed approach would effectively complement the existing Internet filtering techniques. An earlier version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on e-Business (WeB), Milwaukee, WI, 2006.     

A multi-layer text classification framework based on two-level representation model

Text categorization is one of the most common themes in data mining and machine learning fields. Unlike structured data, unstructured text data is more difficult to be analyzed because it contains complicated both syntactic and semantic information. In this paper, we propose a two-level representation model (2RM) to represent text data, one is for representing syntactic information and the other is for semantic information. Each document, in syntactic level, is represented as a term vector where the value of each component is the term frequency and inverse document frequency. The Wikipedia concepts related to terms in syntactic level are used to represent document in semantic level. Meanwhile, we designed a multi-layer classification framework (MLCLA) to make use of the semantic and syntactic information represented in 2RM model. The MLCLA framework contains three classifiers. Among them, two classifiers are applied on syntactic level and semantic level in parallel. The outputs of these two classifiers will be combined and input to the third classifier, so that the final results can be obtained. Experimental results on benchmark data sets (20Newsgroups, Reuters-21578 and Classic3) have shown that the proposed 2RM model plus MLCLA framework improves the text classification performance by comparing with the existing flat text representation models (Term-based VSM, Term Semantic Kernel Model, Concept-based VSM, Concept Semantic Kernel Model and Term + Concept VSM) plus existing classification methods.     

PU text classification enhanced by term frequency–inverse document frequency‐improved weighting

Term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF), one of the most popular feature (also called term or word) weighting methods used to describe documents in the vector space model and the applications related to text mining and information retrieval, can effectively reflect the importance of the term in the collection of documents, in which all documents play the same roles. But, TF–IDF does not take into account the difference of term IDF weighting if the documents play different roles in the collection of documents, such as positive and negative training set in text classification. In view of the aforementioned text, this paper presents a novel TF–IDF‐improved feature weighting approach, which reflects the importance of the term in the positive and the negative training examples, respectively. We also build a weighted voting classifier by iteratively applying the support vector machine algorithm and implement one‐class support vector machine and Positive Example Based Learning methods used for comparison. During classifying, an improved 1‐DNF algorithm, called 1‐DNFC, is also adopted, aiming at identifying more reliable negative documents from the unlabeled examples set. The experimental results show that the performance of term frequency inverse positive–negative document frequency‐based classifier outperforms that of TF–IDF‐based one, and the performance of weighted voting classifier also exceeds that of one‐class support vector machine‐based classifier and Positive Example Based Learning‐based classifier. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An HMM-based over-sampling technique to improve text classification

This paper presents a novel over-sampling method based on document content to handle the class imbalance problem in text classification. The new technique, COS-HMM (Content-based Over-Sampling HMM), includes an HMM that is trained with a corpus in order to create new samples according to current documents. The HMM is treated as a document generator which can produce synthetical instances formed on what it was trained with.To demonstrate its achievement, COS-HMM is tested with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) in two medical documental corpora (OHSUMED and TREC Genomics), and is then compared with the Random Over-Sampling (ROS) and SMOTE techniques. Results suggest that the application of over-sampling strategies increases the global performance of the SVM to classify documents. Based on the empirical and statistical studies, the new method clearly outperforms the baseline method (ROS), and offers a greater performance than SMOTE in the majority of tested cases.     

On-site text classification and knowledge mining for large-scale projects construction by integrated intelligent approach

A large-scale project produces a lot of text data during construction commonly achieved as various management reports. Having the right information at the right time can help the project team understand the project status and manage the construction process more efficiently. However, text information is presented in unstructured or semi-structured formats. Extracting useful information from such a large text warehouse is a challenge. A manual process is costly and often times cannot deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This research proposes an integrated intelligent approach based on natural language processing technology (NLP), which mainly involves three stages. First, a text classification model based on Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is developed to classify the construction on-site reports by analyzing and extracting report text features. At the second stage, the classified construction report texts are analyzed with improved frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) by mutual information to identify and mine construction knowledge. At the third stage, a relation network based on the co-occurrence matrix of the knowledge is presented for visualization and better understanding of the construction on-site information. Actual construction reports are used to verify the feasibility of this approach. The study provides a new approach for handling construction on-site text data which can lead to enhancing management efficiency and practical knowledge discovery for project management.