We describe a method for improving the classification of short text strings using a combination of labeled training data plus a secondary corpus of unlabeled but related longer documents. We show that such unlabeled background knowledge can greatly decrease error rates, particularly if the number of examples or the size of the strings in the training set is small. This is particularly useful when labeling text is a labor-intensive job and when there is a large amount of information available about a particular problem on the World Wide Web. Our approach views the task as one of information integration using WHIRL, a tool that combines database functionalities with techniques from the information-retrieval literature.
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