A Study on Text Classification Methods and Text Features

When it comes to the task of classification the data used for training is the most crucial part. It follows that how this data is processed and presented for the classifier plays an equally important role. This thesis attempts to investigate the performance of multiple classifiers depending on the features that are used, the type of classes to classify and the optimization of said classifiers. The classifiers of interest are support-vector machines (SMO) and multilayer perceptron (MLP), the features tested are word vector spaces and text complexity measures, along with principal component analysis on the complexity measures. The features are created based on the Stockholm-Umeå-Corpus (SUC) and DigInclude, a dataset containing standard and easy-to-read sentences. For the SUC dataset the classifiers attempted to classify texts into nine different text categories, while for the DigInclude dataset the sentences were classified into either standard or simplified classes. The classification tasks on the DigInclude dataset showed poor performance in all trials. The SUC dataset showed best performance when using SMO in combination with word vector spaces. Comparing the SMO classifier on the text complexity measures when using or not using PCA showed that the performance was largely unchanged between the two, although not using PCA had slightly better performanc