Term based semantic clusters for very short text classification

Abstract

Very short texts, such as tweets and invoices, present challenges in classification. Although term occurrences are strong indicators of content, in very short texts, the sparsity of these texts makes it difficult to capture important semantic relationships. A solution calls for a method that not only considers term occurrence, but also handles sparseness well. In this work, we introduce such an approach, the Term Based Semantic Clusters (TBSeC) that employs terms to create distinctive semantic concept clusters. These clusters are ranked using a semantic similarity function which in turn defines a semantic feature space that can be used for text classification. Our method is evaluated in an invoice classification task. Compared to well-known content representation methods the proposed method performs competitively.