Term Network Approach for Transductive Classification

Transductive classification is a useful way to classify texts when just few labeled examples are available. Transductive classification algorithms rely on term frequency to directly classify texts represented in vector space model or to build networks and perform label propagation. Related terms tend to belong to the same class and this information can be used to assign relevance scores of terms for classes and consequently the labels of documents. In this paper we propose the use of term networks to model term relations and perform transductive classification. In order to do so, we propose (i) different ways to generate term networks, (ii) how to assign initial relevance scores for terms, (iii) how to propagate the relevance scores among terms, and (iv) how to use the relevance scores of terms in order to classify documents. We demonstrate that transductive classification based on term networks can surpass the accuracies obtained by transductive classification considering texts represented in other types of networks or vector space model, or even the accuracies obtained by inductive classification. We also demonstrated that we can decrease the size of term networks through feature selection while keeping classification accuracy and decreasing computational complexity.