Text Representation

Definition

Text representation is one of the fundamental problems in text mining and Information Retrieval (IR). It aims to numerically represent the unstructured text documents to make them mathematically computable. For a given set of text documents D = {d_i, i = 1, 2, … , n}, where each d_i stands for a document, the problem of text representation is to represent each d_i of D as a point s_i in a numerical space S, where the distance/similarity between each pair of points in space S is well defined.

Historical Background

Mining the unstructured text data has attracted much attention of researchers in different areas due to its great industrial and commercial application potentials. A fundamental problem of text mining is how to represent the text documents to make them mathematically computable. Various text representation strategies have been proposed in the past decades for different application purposes such as text categorization, novelty detection and Information Retrieval (IR) [5]...