Semantic text classification of emergent disease reports

Traditional text classification studied in the information retrieval and machine learning literature is mainly based on topics. That is, each class represents a particular topic, e.g., sports and politics. However, many real-world problems require more refined classification based on some semantic perspectives. For example, in a set of sentences about a disease, some may report outbreaks of the disease, some may describe how to cure the disease, and yet some may discuss how to prevent the disease. To classify sentences at this semantic level, the traditional bag-of-words model is no longer sufficient. In this paper, we study semantic sentence classification of disease reporting. We show that both keywords and sentence semantic features are useful. Our results demonstrated that this integrated approach is highly effective.