Generating Category Hierarchy for Classifying Large Corpora

摘要

We address the problem of dealing with large collections of data, and investigate the use of automatically constructing domain specific category hierarchies to improve text classification. We use two well-known techniques, the partitioning clustering method called it-means and loss function, to create the category hierarchy. The it-means method involves iterating through the data that the system is permitted to classify during each iteration and construction of a hierarchical structure. In general, the number of clusters k is not given beforehand. Therefore, we used a loss function that measures the degree of disappointment in any differences between the true distribution over inputs and the learner's prediction to select the appropriate number of clusters k. Once the optimal number of k is selected, the procedure is repeated for each cluster. Our evaluation using the 1996 Reuters corpus, which consists of 806,791 documents, showed that automatically constructing hierarchies improves classification accuracy.