An Evaluation of Passage-based Text Categorization

Abstract

Researches in text categorization have been confined to whole-document-level classification, probably due to lack of full-text test collections. However, full-length documents available today in large quantities pose renewed interests in text classification. A document is usually written in an organized structure to present its main topic(s). This structure can be expressed as a sequence of subtopic text blocks, or passages. In order to reflect the subtopic structure of a document, we propose a new passage-level or passage-based text categorization model, which segments a test document into several passages, assigns categories to each passage, and merges the passage categories to the document categories. Compared with traditional document-level categorization, two additional steps, passage splitting and category merging, are required in this model. Using four subsets of the Reuters text categorization test collection and a full-text test collection of which documents are ...