A Feature Based Approach to Leveraging Context for Classifying Newsgroup Style Discussion Segments

Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, Carolyn Penstein Rosé

Abstract: On a multi-dimensional text categorization task, we compare the effectiveness of a feature based approach with the use of a state-of-the-art sequential learning technique that has proven successful for tasks such as "email act classification". Our evaluation demonstrates for the three separate dimensions of a well established annotation scheme that novel thread based features have a greater and more consistent impact on classification performance.