Using restrictive classification and meta classification for junk elimination

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of performing supervised classification on document collections containing also junk documents. With "junk documents" we mean documents that do not belong to the topic categories (classes) we are interested in. This type of documents can typically not be covered by the training set; nevertheless in many real world applications (e.g. classification of web or intranet content, focused crawling etc.) such documents occur quite often and a classifier has to make a decision about them. We tackle this problem by using restrictive methods and ensemble-based meta methods that may decide to leave out some documents rather than assigning them to inappropriate classes with low confidence. Our experiments with four different data sets show that the proposed techniques can eliminate a relatively large fraction of junk documents while dismissing only a significantly smaller fraction of potentially interesting documents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.