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Lecture

Document Classification

In course

CS-423: Distributed information systems

This course introduces the foundations of information retrieval, data mining and knowledge bases, which constitute the foundations of today's Web-based distributed information systems. ...

Description

This lecture covers the task of document classification, where a classifier is constructed to assign labels to unlabeled documents based on a training set. Topics include document features like bag of words, phrases, and word fragments, dealing with high dimensionality, classification algorithms like k-Nearest-Neighbors and Naïve Bayes, and the use of word embeddings for classification. The instructor also discusses the challenges in document classification, such as vocabulary size and feature selection. Various classification methods and their characteristics are explored, including the Naïve Bayes classifier and Fasttext. The lecture concludes with a summary of document classification methods and their applications.

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Instructor

Karl Aberer

Karl Aberer received his PhD in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zürich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. In 2000 he joined EPFL as full professor. Since 2005 he is the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems ( NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch ). He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He has been consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council ( SWTR ) from 2003 - 2011.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Information engineering

Natural language processing: Topics in natural language processing

Related concepts (30)

Document classification

Document classification or document categorization is a problem in library science, information science and computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. This may be done "manually" (or "intellectually") or algorithmically. The intellectual classification of documents has mostly been the province of library science, while the algorithmic classification of documents is mainly in information science and computer science.

Statistical classification

In statistics, classification is the problem of identifying which of a set of categories (sub-populations) an observation (or observations) belongs to. Examples are assigning a given email to the "spam" or "non-spam" class, and assigning a diagnosis to a given patient based on observed characteristics of the patient (sex, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.). Often, the individual observations are analyzed into a set of quantifiable properties, known variously as explanatory variables or features.

Word embedding

In natural language processing (NLP), a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.

Multiclass classification

In machine learning and statistical classification, multiclass classification or multinomial classification is the problem of classifying instances into one of three or more classes (classifying instances into one of two classes is called binary classification). While many classification algorithms (notably multinomial logistic regression) naturally permit the use of more than two classes, some are by nature binary algorithms; these can, however, be turned into multinomial classifiers by a variety of strategies.

Naive Bayes classifier

In statistics, naive Bayes classifiers are a family of simple "probabilistic classifiers" based on applying Bayes' theorem with strong (naive) independence assumptions between the features (see Bayes classifier). They are among the simplest Bayesian network models, but coupled with kernel density estimation, they can achieve high accuracy levels. Naive Bayes classifiers are highly scalable, requiring a number of parameters linear in the number of variables (features/predictors) in a learning problem.

Related lectures (48)

Textual Data Analysis: Classification & Dimensionality Reduction

Explores textual data classification, focusing on methods like Naive Bayes and dimensionality reduction techniques like Principal Component Analysis.

Document Classification: Features and Models

Introduces document classification using features like words and metadata, and models such as k-Nearest-Neighbors and word embeddings.

Nearest Neighbor Rules: Part 2

Explores the Nearest Neighbor Rules, k-NN algorithm challenges, Bayes classifier, and k-means algorithm for clustering.

K-Nearest Neighbors & Feature Expansion

Introduces k-Nearest Neighbors for classification and feature expansion to handle nonlinear data through transformed inputs.

Naive Bayes Classifier