Improving text classification performance with incremental background knowledge

Abstract

Text classification is generally the process of extracting interesting and non-trivial information and knowledge from text. One of the main problems with text classification systems is the lack of labeled data, as well as the cost of labeling unlabeled data. Thus, there is a growing interest in exploring the use of unlabeled data as a way to improve classification performance in text classification. The ready availability of this kind of data in most applications makes it an appealing source of information. In this work we propose an Incremental Background Knowledge (IBK) technique to introduce unlabeled data into the training set by expanding it using initial classifiers to deliver oracle decisions. The defined incremental SVM margin-based method was tested in the Reuters-21578 benchmark showing promising results. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.