String kernels and similarity measures for information retrieval

Measuring a similarity between two strings is a fundamental step in many applications in areas such as text classification and information retrieval. Lately, kernel-based methods have been proposed for this task, both for text and biological sequences. Since kernels are inner products in a feature space, they naturally induce similarity measures. Information-theoretical approaches have also been subject of recent research. The goal is to classify finite sequences without explicit knowledge of their statistical nature: sequences are considered similar if they are likely to be generated by the same source. There is experimental evidence that relative entropy (albeit not being a true metric) yields high accuracy in several classification tasks. Compression-based techniques, such as variations of the Ziv-Lempel algorithm for text, or GenCompress for biological sequences, have been used to estimate the relative entropy. Algorithmic concepts based on the Kolmogorov complexity provide theoretic background for these approaches. This paper describes some string kernels and information theoretic methods. It evaluates the performance of both kinds of methods in text classification tasks, namely in the problems of authorship attribution, language detection, and cross-language document matching.