Centroid-based Classification Enhanced with Wikipedia

Most of the traditional text classification methods employ Bag of Words (BOW) approaches relying on the words frequencies existing within the training corpus and the testing documents. Recently, studies have examined using external knowledge to enrich the text representation of documents. Some have focused on using WordNet which suffers from different limitations including the available number of words, synsets and coverage. Other studies used different aspects of Wikipedia instead. Depending on the features being selected and evaluated and the external knowledge being used, a balance between recall, precision, noise reduction and information loss has to be applied. In this paper, we propose a new Centroid-based classification approach relying on Wikipedia to enrich the representation of documents through the use of Wikpedia's concepts, categories structure, links, and articles text. We extract candidate concepts for each class with the help of Wikipedia and merge them with important features derived directly from the text documents. Different variations of the system were evaluated and the results show improvements in the performance of the system.