Context-sensitive learning methods for text categorization

  • Authors:
  • William W. Cohen;Yoram Singer

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs;AT&T Labs

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Two recently implemented machine-learning algorithms, RIPPERand sleeping-experts for phrases, are evaluated on a number of large text categorization problems. These algorithms both construct classifiers that allow the “context” of a word w to affect how (or even whether) the presence or absence of w will contribute to a classification. However, RIPPER and sleeping-experts differ radically in many other respects: differences include different notions as to what constitutes a context, different ways of combining contexts to construct a classifier, different methods to search for a combination of contexts, and different criteria as to what contexts should be included in such a combination. In spite of these differences, both RIPPER and sleeping-experts perform extremely well across a wide variety of categorization problems, generally outperforming previously applied learning methods. We view this result as a confirmation of the usefulness of classifiers that represent contextual information.