Phrase-based document categorization revisited

Abstract

This paper takes a fresh look at an old idea in Information Retrieval: the use of linguistically extracted phrases as terms in the automatic categorization (aka classification) of documents. Until now, there was found little or no evidence that document categorization benefits from the application of linguistics techniques. Classification algorithms using the most cleverly designed linguistical representations typically do no better than those using simply the bag-of-words representation. Shallow linguistical techniques are used routinely, but their positive effect on the accuracy is small at best.