Text document classification using swarm intelligence

This paper presents an algorithm for the automatic grouping of PDF documents, and with potential application for Web document classification. The algorithm developed is based on an ant-clustering algorithm, which was inspired by the behavior of some ant species in the organization their nests. To apply the ant-clustering algorithm for text document classification, two modifications had to be introduced in the standard algorithm: 1) the use of a metric to evaluate the similarity degree of text data, instead of numeric data; and 2) the proposal of a cooling schedule for a user-defined parameter so as to improve the convergence properties of the algorithm. To illustrate the behavior of the modified algorithm, it was applied to sets of real-world documents taken from the IEEE WCCI -1998 CD.