A term association translation model for naive Bayes text classification

Abstract

Text classification (TC) has long been an important research topic in information retrieval (IR) related areas. In the literature, the bag-of-words (BoW) model has been widely used to represent a document in text classification and many other applications. However, BoW, which ignores the relationships between terms, offers a rather poor document representation. Some previous research has shown that incorporating language models into the naive Bayes classifier (NBC) can improve the performance of text classification. Although the widely used N-gram language models (LM) can exploit the relationships between words to some extent, they cannot model the long-distance dependencies of words. In this paper, we study the term association modeling approach within the translation LM framework for TC. The new model is called the term association translation model (TATM). The innovation is to incorporate term associations into the document model. We employ the term translation model to model such associative terms in the documents. The term association translation model can be learned based on either the joint probability (JP) of the associative terms through the Bayes rule or the mutual information (MI) of the associative terms. The results of TC experiments evaluated on the Reuters-21578 and 20newsgroups corpora demonstrate that the new model implemented in both ways outperforms the standard NBC method and the NBC with a unigram LM. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.