Using kNN model for automatic text categorization

An investigation is conducted on two well-known similarity-based learning approaches to text categorization: the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) classifier and the Rocchio classifier. After identifying the weakness and strength of each technique, a new classifier called the kNN model-based classifier (kNN Model) is proposed. It combines the strength of both kNN and Rocchio. A text categorization prototype, which implements kNN Model along with kNN and Rocchio, is described. An experimental evaluation of different methods is carried out on two common document corpora: the 20-newsgroup collection and the ModApte version of the Reuters-21578 collection of news stories. The experimental results show that the proposed kNN model-based method outperforms the kNN and Rocchio classifiers, and is therefore a good alternative for kNN and Rocchio in some application areas.