Developing a specialized directory system by automatically classifying Web documents

Abstract

This study developed a specialized directory system using an automatic classification technique. Economics was selected as the subject field for the classification experiments with Web documents. The classification scheme of the directory follows the DDC, and subject terms representing each class number or subject category were selected from the DDC table to construct a representative term dictionary. In collecting and classifying the Web documents, various strategies were tested in order to find the optimal thresholds. In the classification experiments, Web documents in economics were classified into a total of 757 hierarchical subject categories built from the DDC scheme. The first and second experiments using the representative term dictionary resulted in relatively high precision ratios of 77 and 60%, respectively. The third experiment employing a machine learning-based k -nearest neighbours (kNN) classifier in a closed experimental setting achieved a precision ratio of 96%. This implies that it is possible to enhance the classification performance by applying a hybrid method combining a dictionary-based technique and a kNN classifier.

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