Chinese Text Categorization Using the Character N-gram

We previously proposed the accumulation method, which is a language-independent text classification method that is based on the character N-gram, and classified English, Japanese, and Korean text documents. The accumulation method does not depend on the language structure, because this method uses the character N-gram to form index terms. If text documents are expressed in Unicode, then the accumulation method can classify documents using the same algorithm. In the present paper, we classify Chinese text documents, which are newspaper articles from the People's Daily 2009-2010 data set. The highest macro-averaged F-measure of the proposed method was 92.6% for the People's Daily 2009-2010 data set. Thus, we obtain good results for the Chinese language. Moreover, we can construct a framework whereby the computer can automatically distinguish the difficulty of each document classification.