Pruning the vocabulary for better context recognition

Language independent ´bag-of-words´ representations are surprisingly effective for text classification. The representation is high dimensional though, containing many non-consistent words for text categorization. These non-consistent words result in reduced generalization performance of subsequent classifiers, e.g., from ill-posed principal component transformations. In this communication, our aim is to study the effect of reducing the least relevant words from the bag-of-words representation. We consider a new approach, using neural network based sensitivity maps and information gain for determination of term relevancy, when pruning the vocabularies. With reduced vocabularies, documents are classified using a latent semantic indexing representation and a probabilistic neural network classifier. Reducing the bag-of-words vocabularies with 90%-98%, we find consistent classification improvement using two mid size data-sets. We also study the applicability of information gain and sensitivity maps for automated keyword generation.