The rapidly increasing number of scientific documents available publicly on the Internet creates the challenge of efficiently organizing and indexing these documents. Due to the time consuming and tedious nature of manual classification and indexing, there is a need for better methods to automate this process. This thesis proposes an approach which leverages encyclopedic background knowledge for enriching domain-specific ontologies with textual and structural information about the semantic vicinity of the ontologies' concepts. The proposed approach aims to exploit this information for improving both ontology-based methods for classifying and indexing documents and methods based on supervised machine learning.
@cite_4: Multi-category classification of short dialogues is a common task performed by humans. When assigning a question to an expert, a customer service operator tries to classify the customer query into one of N different classes for which experts are available. Similarly, questions on the web (for example questions at Yahoo Answers) can be automatically forwarded to a restricted group of people with a specific expertise. Typical questions are short and assume background world knowledge for correct classification. With exponentially increasing amount of knowledge available, with distinct properties (labeled vs unlabeled, structured vs unstructured), no single knowledge-transfer algorithm such as transfer learning, multi-task learning or selftaught learning can be applied universally. In this work we show that bag-of-words classifiers performs poorly on noisy short conversational text snippets. We present an algorithm for leveraging heterogeneous data sources and algorithms with significant improvements over any single algorithm, rivaling human performance. Using different algorithms for each knowledge source we use mutual information to aggressively prune features. With heterogeneous data sources including Wikipedia, Open Directory Project (ODP), and Yahoo Answers, we show 89.4 and 96.8 correct classification on Google Answers corpus and Switchboard corpus using only 200 features class. This reflects a huge improvement over bag of words approaches and 48-65 error reduction over previously published state of art (Gabrilovich et. al. 2006).
@cite_7: The experimental evidence accumulated over the past 20 years indicates that textindexing systems based on the assignment of appropriately weighted single terms produce retrieval results that are superior to those obtainable with other more elaborate text representations. These results depend crucially on the choice of effective term weighting systems. This paper summarizes the insights gained in automatic term weighting, and provides baseline single term indexing models with which other more elaborate content analysis procedures can be compared.
@cite_8: 
@cite_1: Computing semantic relatedness of natural language texts requires access to vast amounts of common-sense and domain-specific world knowledge. We propose Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), a novel method that represents the meaning of texts in a high-dimensional space of concepts derived from Wikipedia. We use machine learning techniques to explicitly represent the meaning of any text as a weighted vector of Wikipedia-based concepts. Assessing the relatedness of texts in this space amounts to comparing the corresponding vectors using conventional metrics (e.g., cosine). Compared with the previous state of the art, using ESA results in substantial improvements in correlation of computed relatedness scores with human judgments: from r = 0.56 to 0.75 for individual words and from r = 0.60 to 0.72 for texts. Importantly, due to the use of natural concepts, the ESA model is easy to explain to human users.
@cite_6: A new method for automatic indexing and retrieval is described. The approach is to take advantage of implicit higher-order structure in the association of terms with documents (“semantic structure”) in order to improve the detection of relevant documents on the basis of terms found in queries. The particular technique used is singular-value decomposition, in which a large term by document matrix is decomposed into a set of ca. 100 orthogonal factors from which the original matrix can be approximated by linear combination. Documents are represented by ca. 100 item vectors of factor weights. Queries are represented as pseudo-document vectors formed from weighted combinations of terms, and documents with supra-threshold cosine values are returned. initial tests find this completely automatic method for retrieval to be promising.
Both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods have been applied to document classification and indexing. A popular method for representing documents in supervised learning is the approach, which represents documents by the words they contain, disregarding the order in which they occur. Instead of single words, also sequences of words () can be used to represent a document. The words or n-grams can be weighted by different schemes such as term frequency or TF-IDF @cite_7 . While TF-IDF is unable to capture the semantic structures in documents, methods such as @cite_6 and @cite_8 try to overcome this weakness. Recently, also encyclopedic background knowledge has been leveraged for representing documents. For example, @cite_1 represents the meaning of documents as weighted vectors of Wikipedia-based concepts. While originally intended for computing semantic relatedness, it has also been applied successfully to text classification (e.g. @cite_4 ).