Text Categorization

Abstract

During the last 15 years, the production of documents in digital form has exploded, due to the increased availability of hardware and software tools for generating digital data (e.g., personal computers, digital cameras, word processors) and for digitizing data that had been originated in nondigital form (e.g., scanners, OCR software). This phenomenon has also strongly affected “novel” digital media such as imagery, video, music, and so forth. However, natural language text has been, at least from a quantitative viewpoint, the medium most responsible for this explosion, due to its immediacy and to the ubiquity of word processing and text authoring tools. As a consequence, there is an increased need for hardware and software solutions for storing, organizing, and retrieving the large amounts of digital text that are being produced, with an eye towards its future use.