An improved TF-IDF approach for text classification

Abstract

This paper presents a new improved term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) approach which uses confidence, support and characteristic words to enhance the recall and precision of text classification. Synonyms defined by a lexicon are processed in the improved TF-IDF approach. We detailedly discuss and analyze the relationship among confidence, recall and precision. The experiments based on science and technology gave promising results that the new TF-IDF approach improves the precision and recall of text classification compared with the conventional TF-IDF approach.