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Effective Top-Down Active Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification

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Book cover Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7819))

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Abstract

Hierarchical text classification is an important task in many real-world applications. To build an accurate hierarchical classification system with many categories, usually a very large number of documents must be labeled and provided. This can be very costly. Active learning has been shown to effectively reduce the labeling effort in traditional (flat) text classification, but few works have been done in hierarchical text classification due to several challenges. A major challenge is to reduce the so-called out-of-domain queries. Previous state-of-the-art approaches tackle this challenge by simultaneously forming the unlabeled pools on all the categories regardless of the inherited hierarchical dependence of classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel top-down hierarchical active learning framework, and effective strategies to tackle this and other challenges. With extensive experiments on eight real-world hierarchical text datasets, we demonstrate that our strategies are highly effective, and they outperform the state-of-the-art hierarchical active learning methods by reducing 20% to 40% queries.

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Li, X., Ling, C.X., Wang, H. (2013). Effective Top-Down Active Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification. In: Pei, J., Tseng, V.S., Cao, L., Motoda, H., Xu, G. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7819. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37456-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37456-2_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37455-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37456-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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