Integrating compound terms in Bayesian text classification

Text classification usually assumed a word-based document representation. In this paper, we propose a new approach to integrate compound terms in Bayesian text classification. Compound terms are used as complementary features to single words. An acute problem is to consider their dependence with the component words. In this paper, we propose to use smoothing techniques to combine both compound term and word representations. Experiments have been conducted on two corpora. Our results show that this approach can slightly but steadily improve the classification performance on both test corpora.