Open Directory Project (ODP) has been successfully utilized in text classification due to its representation ability of various categories. However, ODP includes a limited number of entities, which play an important role in classification tasks. In this paper, we enrich the semantics of ODP categories with Probase entities. To effectively incorporate Probase entities in ODP categories, we first represent each ODP category and Probase entity in terms of concepts. Next, we measure the semantic relevance between an ODP category and a Probase entity based on the concept vector. Finally, we use Probase entity to enrich the semantics of the ODP categories. Our experimental results show that the proposed methodology exhibits a significant improvement over state-of-the-art techniques in the ODP-based text classification.
Understanding the rapidly growing short text is very important. Short text is different from traditional documents in its shortness and sparsity, which hinders the application of conventional machine learning and text mining algorithms. Two major approaches have been exploited to enrich the representation of short text. One is to fetch contextual information of a short text to directly add more text; the other is to derive latent topics from existing large corpus, which are used as features to enrich the representation of short text. The latter approach is elegant and efficient in most cases. The major trend along this direction is to derive latent topics of certain granularity through well-known topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). However, topics of certain granularity are usually not sufficient to set up effective feature spaces. In this paper, we move forward along this direction by proposing an method to leverage topics at multiple granularity, which can model the short text more precisely. Taking short text classification as an example, we compared our proposed method with the state-of-the-art baseline over one open data set. Our method reduced the classification error by 20.25 and 16.68 respectively on two classifiers. We propose a simple, scalable, and non-parametric approach for short text classification. Leveraging the well studied and scalable Information Retrieval (IR) framework, our approach mimics human labeling process for a piece of short text. It first selects the most representative and topical-indicative words from a given short text as query words, and then searches for a small set of labeled short texts best matching the query words. The predicted category label is the majority vote of the search results. Evaluated on a collection of more than 12K Web snippets, the proposed approach achieves comparable classification accuracy with the baseline Maximum Entropy classifier using as few as 3 query words and top-5 best matching search hits. Among the four query word selection schemes proposed and evaluated in our experiments, term frequency together with clarity gives the best classification accuracy. Web-search queries are typically short and ambiguous. To classify these queries into certain target categories is a difficult but important problem. In this article, we present a new technique called query enrichment, which takes a short query and maps it to intermediate objects. Based on the collected intermediate objects, the query is then mapped to target categories. To build the necessary mapping functions, we use an ensemble of search engines to produce an enrichment of the queries. Our technique was applied to the ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining competition (ACM KDDCUP) in 2005, where we won the championship on all three evaluation metrics (precision, F1 measure, which combines precision and recall, and creativity, which is judged by the organizers) among a total of 33 teams worldwide. In this article, we show that, despite the difficulty of an abundance of ambiguous queries and lack of training data, our query-enrichment technique can solve the problem satisfactorily through a two-phase classification framework. We present a detailed description of our algorithm and experimental evaluation. Our best result for F1 and precision is 42.4p and 44.4p, respectively, which is 9.6p and 24.3p higher than those from the runner-ups, respectively.