Automatic category theme identification and hierarchy generation for Chinese text categorization

Recently research on text mining has attracted lots of attention from both industrial and academic fields. Text mining concerns of discovering unknown patterns or knowledge from a large text repository. The problem is not easy to tackle due to the semi-structured or even unstructured nature of those texts under consideration. Many approaches have been devised for mining various kinds of knowledge from texts. One important aspect of text mining is on automatic text categorization, which assigns a text document to some predefined category if the document falls into the theme of the category. Traditionally the categories are arranged in hierarchical manner to achieve effective searching and indexing as well as easy comprehension for human beings. The determination of category themes and their hierarchical structures were most done by human experts. In this work, we developed an approach to automatically generate category themes and reveal the hierarchical structure among them. We also used the generated structure to categorize text documents. The document collection was trained by a self-organizing map to form two feature maps. These maps were then analyzed to obtain the category themes and their structure. Although the test corpus contains documents written in Chinese, the proposed approach can be applied to documents written in any language and such documents can be transformed into a list of separated terms.