Document classification developed over the last ten years, using techniques originating from the pattern recognition and machine learning communities. All these methods do operate on flat text representations where word occurrences are considered independents. The recent paper (Sebastiani, 2002) gives a very good survey on textual document classification. With the development of structured textual and multimedia documents, and with the increasing importance of structured document formats like XML, the document nature is changing. Structured documents usually have a much richer representation than flat ones. They have a logical structure. They are often composed of heterogeneous information sources (e.g. text, image, video, metadata, etc). Another major change with structured documents is the possibility to access document elements or fragments. The development of classifiers for structured content is a new challenge for the machine learning and IR communities. A classifier for structured documents should be able to make use of the different content information sources present in an XML document and to classify both full documents and document parts. It should easily adapt to a variety of different sources (e.g. to different Document Type Definitions). It should be able to scale with large document collections.
TopBackground
Handling structured documents for different IR tasks is a new domain which has recently attracted an increasing attention. Most of the work in this new area has concentrated on ad hoc retrieval. Recent Sigir workshops (2000, 2002 and 2004) and journal issues (Baeza-Yates et al., 2002; Campos et. al., 2004) where dedicated to this subject. Most teams involved in this research gather around the recent initiative for the development and the evaluation of XML IR systems (INEX) which has been launched in 2002. Besides this mainstream of research, some work is also developing around other generic IR problems like clustering and classification for structured documents. Clustering has mainly been dealt with in the database community, focusing on structure clustering and ignoring the document content (Termier et al., 2002; Zaki and Aggarwal, 2003). Structured document classification the focus of this paper is discussed in greater length below.
Most papers dealing with structured documents classification propose to combine flat text classifiers operating on distinct document elements in order to classify the whole document. This has mainly been developed for the categorization of HTML pages. (Yang et al., 2002) combine three classifiers operating respectively on the textual information of a page, on titles and hyperlinks. (Cline, 1999) maps a structured document onto a fixed-size vector where each structural entity (title, links, text etc...) is encoded into a specific part of the vector. (Dumais and Chen, 2000) make use of the HTML tags information to select the most relevant part of each document. (Chakrabarti et al., 1998) use the information contained in neighboring documents of an HTML pages. All these methods explicitly rely on the HTML tag semantic, i.e.. they need to “know” whether tags correspond to a title, a link, a reference, etc. They cannot adapt to more general structured categorization tasks. Most models rely on a vectorial description of the document and do not offer a natural way for dealing with document fragments. Our model is not dependent of the semantic of the tags and is able to learn which parts of a document are relevant for the classification task.
A second family of models uses more principled approaches for structured documents. (Yi and Sundaresan, 2000) develop a probabilistic model for tree like document classification. This model makes use of local word frequencies specific of each node so that it faces a very severe estimation problem for these local probabilities. (Diligenti et al., 2001) propose the Hidden Tree Markov Model (HTMM) which is an extension of HMMs to tree like structures. They performed tests on the WebKB collection showing a slight improvement over Naive Bayes (1%). Outside the field of Information Retrieval, some related models have also been proposed. The hierarchical HMM (Fine et al., 1998) (HHMM) is a generalization of HMMs where hidden nodes emit sequences instead of symbols for classical HMMs. The HHMM is aimed at discovering sub-structures in sequences instead of processing structured data.