Assigning Terms to Domains by Document Classification

In this paper we investigate a number of questions relating to the identification of the domain of a term by domain classification of the document in which the term occurs. We propose and evaluate a straightforward method for domain classification of documents in 24 languages that exploits a multilingual thesaurus and Wikipedia. We investigate and provide quantitative results about the extent to which humans agree about the domain classification of documents and terms also the extent to which terms are likely to “inherit ” the domain of their parent document.