Skip to main content

An Empirical Comparison of Text Categorization Methods

  • Conference paper
String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2857))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In this paper we present a comprehensive comparison of the performance of a number of text categorization methods in two different data sets. In particular, we evaluate the Vector and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) methods, a classifier based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) and the k-Nearest Neighbor variations of the Vector and LSA models.

We report the results obtained using the Mean Reciprocal Rank as a measure of overall performance, a commonly used evaluation measure for question answering tasks. We argue that this evaluation measure is also very well suited for text categorization tasks.

Our results show that overall, SVMs and k-NN LSA perform better than the other methods, in a statistically significant way.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Baeza-Yates, R., Ribeiro-Neto, B.: Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Berger, A., Caruana, R., Cohn, D., Freitag, D., Mittal, V.O.: Bridging the lexical chasm: statistical approaches to answer-finding. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, July 2000, Athens, Greece, pp. 192–199 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Burges, C.J.C.: A tutorial on support vector machines for pattern recognition. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2(2), 121–167 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Caron, J.: Experiments with LSA scoring: Optimal rank and basis. In: Proceedings of SIAM Computational Information Retrieval Workshop, Raleigh, NC, USA (October 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Chang, C.-C., Lin, C.-J.: LIBSVM: a library for support vector machines (2001), Software, available at http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm

  6. Cooper, W.S.: Expected search length: a single measure of retrieval effectiveness based on weak ordering action of retrieval systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 19(1), 30–41 (1968)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Cortes, C., Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks. Machine Learning 20(3), 273–297 (1995)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Creecy, R.M., Masand, B.M., Smith, S.J., Waltz, D.L.: Trading MIPS and memory for knowledge engineering: classifying census returns on the Connection Machine. Communications of the ACM 39(1), 48–63 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Cristianini, N., Shawe-Taylor, J.: An Introduction to Support Vector Machines. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Deerwester, S.C., Dumais, S.T., Landauer, T.K., Furnas, G.W., Harshman, R.A.: Indexing by latent semantic analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 41(6), 391–407 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Furnas, G.W., Deerwester, S.C., Dumais, S.T., Landauer, T.K., Harshman, R.A., Streeter, L.A., Lochbaum, K.E.: Information retrieval using a singular value decomposition model of latent semantic structure. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Grassau, France, June 1988, pp. 465–480 (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Joachims, T.: Text categorization with support vector machines: learning with many relevant features. In: Nédellec, C., Rouveirol, C. (eds.) ECML 1998. LNCS, vol. 1398, pp. 137–142. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Joachims, T.: Transductive inference for text classification using support vector machines. In: Bratko, I., Dzeroski, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Machine Learning, Bled, Slovenia, 1999, pp. 200–209. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Jones, K.S., Willett, P. (eds.): Readings in Information Retrieval. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., Los Altos (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Masand, B., Linoff, G., Waltz, D.: Classifying news stories using memory-based reasoning. In: Belkin, N.J., Ingwersen, P., Pejtersen, A.M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 15th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 59–65. ACM Press, New York (1992)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Salton, G.: The SMART Retrieval System. Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey (1971)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Salton, G., Buckley, C.: Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval. Information Processing and Management 24(5), 513–523 (1988); Also reprinted in [14, pp. 323–328]

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Salton, G., Lesk, M.: Computer evaluation of indexing and text processing. Journal of the ACM 15(1), 8–36 (1968); Also reprinted in [14, pp. 60–84]

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Sebastiani, F.: Machine learning in automated text categorization. ACM. Computing Surveys 34(1), 1–47 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Vapnik, V.: The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Voorhees, E.M.: The TREC-8 question answering track report. In: Voorhees, E.M., Harman, D.K. (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th Text Retrieval Conference, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, November 1999, pp. 77–82 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Yang, Y.: Expert network: effective and efficient learning from human decisions in text categorisation and retrieval. In: Bruce Croft, W., van Rijsbergen, C.J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 17th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Dublin, Ireland, pp. 13–22. Springer, Heidelberg (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Yang, Y., Liu, X.: A re-examination of text categorization methods. In: Hearst, M.A., Gey, F., Tong, R. (eds.) Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, USA, August 1999, pp. 42–49 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Yang, Y., Pedersen, J.O.: A comparative study on feature selection in text categorization. In: Fisher, D.H. (ed.) Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Machine Learning, Nashville, TN, USA, pp. 412–420. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco (1997)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Cardoso-Cachopo, A., Oliveira, A.L. (2003). An Empirical Comparison of Text Categorization Methods. In: Nascimento, M.A., de Moura, E.S., Oliveira, A.L. (eds) String Processing and Information Retrieval. SPIRE 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2857. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39984-1_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39984-1_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20177-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39984-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics