Question

Advice please. I have a collection of documents that all share a common attribute (e.g. The word French appears) some of these documents have been marked as not pertinent to this collection (e.g. French kiss appears) but not all documents are guaranteed to have been identified. What is the best method to use to figure out which other documents don’t belong.

Answer 1

Assumptions

Given your example “French”, I will work under the assumption that the feature is a word that appears in the document. Also, since you mention that “French kiss” is not relevant, I will further assume that in your case, a feature is a word used in a particular sense. For example, if “pool” is a feature, you may say that documents mentioning swimming pools are relevant, but those talking about pool (the sport, like snooker or billiards) are not relevant.

• Note: Although word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods would work, they require too much effort, and is an overkill for this purpose.

Suggestion: localized language model + bootstrapping

Think of it this way: You don’t have an incomplete training set, but a smaller training set. The idea is to use this small training data to build bigger training data. This is bootstrapping.

For each occurrence of your feature in the training data, build a language model based only on the words surrounding it. You don’t need to build a model for the entire document. Ideally, just the sentences containing the feature should suffice. This is what I am calling a localized language model (LLM).

Build two such LLMs from your training data (let’s call it T_0): one for pertinent documents, say M1, and another for irrelevant documents, say M0. Now, to build a bigger training data, classify documents based on M1 and M0. For every new document d, if d does not contain the feature-word, it will automatically be added as a “bad” document. If d contains the feature-word, then consider a local window around this word in d (the same window size that you used to build the LLMs), and compute the perplexity of this sequence of words with M0 and M1. Classify the document as belonging to the class which gives lower perplexity.

To formalize, the pseudo-code is:

T_0 := initial training set (consisting of relevant/irrelevant documents)
D0 := additional data to be bootstrapped
N := iterations for bootstrapping

for i = 0 to N-1
  T_i+1 := empty training set
  Build M0 and M1 as discussed above using a window-size w
  for d in D0
    if feature-word not in d
    then add d to irrelevant documents of T_i+1
    else
      compute perplexity scores P0 and P1 corresponding to M0 and M1 using
      window size w around the feature-word in d.
      if P0 < P1 - delta
        add d to irrelevant documents of T_i+1
      else if P1 < P0 - delta
        add d to relevant documents of T_i+1
      else
        do not use d in T_i+1
      end
    end
  end
  Select a small random sample from relevant and irrelevant documents in
  T_i+1, and (re)classify them manually if required.
end

• T_N is your final training set. In this above bootstrapping, the parameter delta needs to be determined with experiments on some held-out data (also called development data).
• The manual reclassification on a small sample is done so that the noise during this bootstrapping is not accumulated through all the N iterations.