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On entropy-based term weighting schemes for text categorization

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Abstract

In text categorization, Vector Space Model (VSM) has been widely used for representing documents, in which a document is represented by a vector of terms. Since different terms contribute to a document’s semantics in various degrees, a number of term weighting schemes have been proposed for VSM to improve text categorization performance. Much evidence shows that the performance of a term weighting scheme often varies across different text categorization tasks, while the mechanism underlying variability in a scheme’s performance remains unclear. Moreover, existing schemes often weight a term with respect to a category locally, without considering the global distribution of a term’s occurrences across all categories in a corpus. In this paper, we first systematically examine pros and cons of existing term weighting schemes in text categorization and explore the reasons why some schemes with sound theoretical bases, such as chi-square test and information gain, perform poorly in empirical evaluations. By measuring the concentration that a term distributes across all categories in a corpus, we then propose a series of entropy-based term weighting schemes to measure the distinguishing power of a term in text categorization. Through extensive experiments on five different datasets, the proposed term weighting schemes consistently outperform the state-of-the-art schemes. Moreover, our findings shed new light on how to choose and develop an effective term weighting scheme for a specific text categorization task.

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Notes

  1. http://www.daviddlewis.com/resources/testcollections/reuters21578/.

  2. http://jwebpro.sourceforge.net/data-web-snippets.tar.gz.

  3. http://qwone.com/~jason/20Newsgroups/.

  4. http://web.ist.utl.pt/~acardoso/datasets/.

  5. http://disi.unitn.it/moschitti/corpora.htm.

  6. http://tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer/.

  7. http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/liblinear/.

  8. A negative correlation leads to a value of \({or}<1\), while a positive one leads to a value of \({or}>1\).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, SCUT (No. D2200150, D2201300), the Science and Technology Programs of Guangzhou (Nos. 201704030076, 201802010027, 201902010046), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62076100) and National Key Research and Development Program of China (Standard knowledge graph for epidemic prevention and production recovering intelligent service platform and its applications).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Tao Wang

  2. School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Yi Cai

  3. Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot, (South China University of Technology) Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China

    Yi Cai

  4. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Ho-fung Leung

  5. Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Raymond Y. K. Lau

  6. Department of Computing and Decision Sciences, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China

    Haoran Xie

  7. Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Qing Li

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Wang, T., Cai, Y., Leung, Hf. et al. On entropy-based term weighting schemes for text categorization. Knowl Inf Syst 63, 2313–2346 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-021-01581-5

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