Bridging Taxonomic Semantics to Accurate Hierarchical Classification

Abstract

The unregulated and open nature of the Internet and the explosive growth of the Web create a pressing need to provide various services for content categorization. The hierarchical classification attempts to achieve both accurate classification and increased comprehensibility. It has also been shown in literature that hierarchical models outperform flat models in training efficiency, classification efficiency, and classification accuracy (Koller & Sahami, 1997; McCallum, Rosenfeld, Mitchell & Ng, 1998; Ruiz & Srinivasan ,1999; Dumais & Chen, 2000; Yang, Zhang & Kisiel, 2003; Cai & Hofmann, 2004; Liu, Yang, Wan, Zeng, Cheng & Ma, 2005). However, the quality of the taxonomy attracted little attention in past works. Actually, different taxonomies can result in differences in classification. So the quality of the taxonomy should be considered for real-world classifications. Even a semantically sound taxonomy does not necessarily lead to the intended classification performance (Tang, Zhang & Liu 2006). Therefore, it is desirable to construct or modify a hierarchy to better suit the hierarchical content classification task.