Integrating external knowledge to supplement training data in semi-supervised learning for text categorization

Text Categorization (TC) is the automated assignment of text documents to predefined categories based on document contents. TC has been an application for many learning approaches, which prove effective. Nevertheless, TC provides many challenges to machine learning. In this paper, we suggest, for text categorization, the integration of external WordNet lexical information to supplement training data for a semi-supervised clustering algorithm which can learn from both training and test documents to classify new unseen documents. This algorithm is the "Semi-Supervised Fuzzy c-Means" (ssFCM). Our experiments use Reuters 21578 database and consist of binary classifications for categories selected from the 115 TOPICS classes of the Reuters collection. Using the Vector Space Model, each document is represented by its original feature vector augmented with external feature vector generated using WordNet. We verify experimentally that the integration of WordNet helps ssFCM improve its performance, effectively addresses the classification of documents into categories with few training documents and does not interfere with the use of training data.