A novel semi supervised approach for text classification

Text categorization, also known as text classification is a supervised classification problem. It aims to assign a predefined class label or group to a new or unknown text document. Most of the time we need a collection of large data from each class to train the classifier. It may be noted that, it is very hard or expensive to collect labelled text data. In most cases we assign the label manually which is neither cost effective nor efficient. In this paper, we have introduced a semi-supervised classification approach where the learner needs very small amount of labelled data with a large amount of unlabeled data to assign a class label to a new or unknown text document. The proposed method uses Kohonen self organizing map (SOM) for labelling the unlabeled data and three classifiers namely support vector machine (SVM), Naïve Bayes (NB), and decision tree (DT): classification and regression tree (CART) for observing the accuracy of classification. The experimental results obtained show the effectiveness of our proposed method.