Evaluation of User Profile Construction Method by Fuzzy Inference

Abstract

To construct user profiles automatically, an extraction method for representative keywords from a set of documents is needed. In our previous works, we suggested such a method and showed its usefulness. Here, we apply it to the classification problem and observe how much it contributes to performance improvement. The method can be used as a linear document classifier with few modifications. So, we first evaluate its performance for that case. The method is also applicable to some non-linear classification methods such as GIS (Generalized Instance Set). In GIS algorithm, generalized instances are built from training documents by a generalization function and then the K-NN algorithm is applied to them, where the method can be used as a generalization function. For comparative works, two famous linear classification methods, Rocchio and Widrow-Hoff algorithms, are also used. Experimental results show that our method is better than the others for the case that only positive documents are considered, but not when negative documents are considered together.