• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.270-277
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• 2002

Text filtering is a task of deciding whether a document has relevance to a specified topic. As Internet and Web becomes wide-spread and the number of documents delivered by e-mail explosively grows the importance of text filtering increases as well. The aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy of text filtering systems by using machine learning techniques. We apply AdaBoost algorithms to the filtering task. An AdaBoost algorithm generates and combines a series of simple hypotheses. Each of the hypotheses decides the relevance of a document to a topic on the basis of whether or not the document includes a certain word. We begin with an existing AdaBoost algorithm which uses weak hypotheses with their output of 1 or -1. Then we extend the algorithm to use weak hypotheses with real-valued outputs which was proposed recently to improve error reduction rates and final filtering performance. Next, we attempt to achieve further improvement in the AdaBoost's performance by first setting weights randomly according to the continuous Poisson distribution, executing AdaBoost, repeating these steps several times, and then combining all the hypotheses learned. This has the effect of mitigating the ovefitting problem which may occur when learning from a small number of data. Experiments have been performed on the real document collections used in TREC-8, a well-established text retrieval contest. This dataset includes Financial Times articles from 1992 to 1994. The experimental results show that AdaBoost with real-valued hypotheses outperforms AdaBoost with binary-valued hypotheses, and that AdaBoost iterated with random weights further improves filtering accuracy. Comparison results of all the participants of the TREC-8 filtering task are also provided.