Intra-Topic Variability Normalization based on Linear Projection for Topic Classification

Quan Liu, Wu Guo, Zhen-Hua Ling, Hui Jiang, Yu Hu

Abstract: This paper proposes a variability normalization algorithm to reduce the variability between intra-topic documents for topic classification. Firstly, an optimization problem is constructed based on linear variability removable assumption. Secondly, a new feature space for document representation is found by solving the optimization problem with kernel principle component analysis (KPCA). Finally, effective feature transformation is taken through linear projection. As for experiments, state-of-the-art SVM and KNN algorithm are adopted for topic classification respectively. Experimental results on a free-style conversational corpus show that the proposed variability normalization algorithm for topic classification achieves 3.8% absolute improvement for micro-F1 measure.