Several Text Categorization applications require a representation beyond the standard bag-of-words paradigm. Kernel-based learning has approached this problem by (i) considering information about syntactic structure or by (ii) incorporating knowledge about the semantic similarity of term features. We propose a generalized framework consisting of a family of kernels that jointly incorporate syntactic and semantic similarity and demonstrate the power of this approach in a series of experiments.

In this paper we propose a new approach to the design of semantic smoothing kernels for text classification. These kernels implicitly encode a superconcept expansion in a semantic network using well-known measures of term similarity. The experimental evaluation on two different datasets indicates that our approach consistently improves performance in situations of little training data and data sparseness.

Document representations for text classification are typically based on the classical bag-of-words paradigm. This approach comes with deficiencies that motivate the integration of features on a higher semantic level than single words. In this paper we propose an enhancement of the classical document representation through concepts extracted from background knowledge. Boosting is used for actual classification. Experimental evaluations on two well known text corpora support our approach through consistent improvement of the results.