Text categorization is useful for indexing documents for information retrieval, filtering parts for document understanding, and summarizing contents of documents of special interests. We describe a text categorization task and an experiment using documents from the Reuters and OHSUMED collections. We applied the Decision Forest classifier and compared its accuracies to those of C4.5 and kNN classifiers using both category dependent and category independent term selection schemes. It is found that Decision Forest outperforms both C4.5 and kNN in all cases, and that category dependent term selection yields better accuracies. Performances of al three classifiers degrade from the Reuters collection to the OHSUMED collection, but Decision Forest remains to be superior.

Date Published: 22 December 1999
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 3967, Document Recognition and Retrieval VII, (22 December 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.373494

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3967:
Document Recognition and Retrieval VII
Daniel P. Lopresti; Jiangying Zhou, Editor(s)