Evaluating WordNet Features in Text Classification Models

Incorporating semantic features from the WordNet lexical database is among one of the many approaches that have been tried to improve the predictive performance of text classification models. The intuition behind this is that keywords in the training set alone may not be extensive enough to enable generation of a universal model for a category, but if we incorporate the word relationships in WordNet, a more accurate model may be possible. Other researchers have previously evaluated the effectiveness of incorporating WordNet synonyms, hypernyms, and hyponyms into text classification models. Generally, they have found that improvements in accuracy using features derived from these relationships are dependent upon the nature of the text corpora from which the document collections are extracted. In this paper, we not only reconsider the role of WordNet synonyms, hypernyms, and hyponyms in text classification models, we also consider the role of WordNet meronyms and holonyms. Incorporating these WordNet relationships into a Coordinate Matching classifier, a Naive Bayes classifier, and a Support Vector Machine classifier, we evaluate our approach on six document collections extracted from the Reuters-21578, USENET, and DigiTrad text corpora. Experimental results show that none of the WordNet relationships were effective at increasing the accuracy of the Naive Bayes classifier. Synonyms, hypernyms, and holonyms were effective at increasing the accuracy of the Coordinate Matching classifier, and hypernyms were effective at increasing the accuracy of the SVM classifier.