Multilingual Text Classification Using Ontologies

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate strategies for automatically classifying documents in different languages thematically, geographically or according to other criteria. A novel linguistically motivated text representation scheme is presented that can be used with machine learning algorithms in order to learn classifications from pre-classified examples and then automatically classify documents that might be provided in entirely different languages. Our approach makes use of ontologies and lexical resources but goes beyond a simple mapping from terms to concepts by fully exploiting the external knowledge manifested in such resources and mapping to entire regions of concepts. For this, a graph traversal algorithm is used to explore related concepts that might be relevant. Extensive testing has shown that our methods lead to significant improvements compared to existing approaches.