Traditional text classification studied in the IR literature is mainly based on topics. That is, each class or category represents a particular topic, e.g., sports, politics or sciences. However, many real-world text classification problems require more refined classification based on some semantic aspects. For example, in a set of documents about a particular disease, some documents may report the outbreak of the disease, some may describe how to cure the disease, some may discuss how to prevent the disease, and yet some others may include all the above information. To classify text at this semantic level, the traditional bag of words model is no longer sufficient. In this paper, we report a text classification study at the semantic level and show that sentence semantic and structure features are very useful for such kind of classification. Our experimental results based on a disease outbreak dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.