Learning to classify documents according to genre

Genre or style analysis can be used to improve results achieved using standard IR techniques. A genre class is a group of documents that are written in a similar style. Genre classification can identify documents that are written in a style most likely to satisfy a user's information need. We consider the use of Machine Learning techniques applied to the task of automatic genre classification. We investigate two sample genre classification tasks: whether a news article is subjective or objective; and whether a review is positive or negative. We investigate the use of three different feature-sets for building genre classifiers. We argue that traditional methods of evaluating text classifiers are insufficient for genre classifiers and emphasize domain transfer for the generated classifiers. Domain transfer indicates the ability of a genre classifier to classify documents that are about topics other than those it was trained on. For both sample genre classification tasks, we build c...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JASIS
• Authors: Aidan Finn, Nicholas Kushmerick
• Keywords: Genre Classification, Genre Classifier, JASIS 2006, Sample Genre