Evaluation and Construction of Training Corpuses for Text Classification: A Preliminary Study

Text classification is becoming more and more important with the rapid growth of on-line information available. It was observed that the quality of training corpus impacts the performance of the trained classifier. This paper proposes an approach to build high-quality training corpuses for better classification performance by first exploring the properties of training corpuses, and then giving an algorithm for constructing training corpuses semi-automatically. Preliminary experimental results validate our approach: classifiers based on the training corpuses constructed by our approach can achieve good performance while the training corpus’ size is significantly reduced. Our approach can be used for building efficient and lightweight classification systems.