Rich document representation and classification: An analysis

There are three factors involved in text classification. These are classification model, similarity measure and document representation model. In this paper, we will focus on document representation and demonstrate that the choice of document representation has a profound impact on the quality of the classifier. In our experiments, we have used the centroid-based text classifier, which is a simple and robust text classification scheme. We will compare four different types of document representations: N-grams, Single terms, phrases and RDR which is a logic-based document representation. The N-gram representation is a string-based representation with no linguistic processing. The Single term approach is based on words with minimum linguistic processing. The phrase approach is based on linguistically formed phrases and single words. The RDR is based on linguistic processing and representing documents as a set of logical predicates. We have experimented with many text collections and we have obtained similar results. Here, we base our arguments on experiments conducted on Reuters-21578. We show that RDR, the more complex representation, produces more effective classifier on Reuters-21578, followed by the phrase approach.