Inductive text classification for medical applications

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Abstract
Text classification poses a significant challenge for knowledge-based technologies because it touches on all the familiar demons of artificial intelligence: the knowledge engineering bottleneck, problems of scale, easy portability across multiple applications, and cost-effective system construction. Information retrieval (IR) technologies traditionally avoid all of these issues by defining a document in terms of a statistical profile of its lexical items. The IR community is willing to exploit a superficial type of knowledge found in dictionaries and thesaurae, but anything that requires customization, application-specific engineering, or any amount of manual tinkering is thought to be incompatible with practical cost-effective system designs. In this paper those assumptions are challenged and it is shown how machine learning techniques can operate as an effective method for automated knowledge acquisition when it is applied to a representative training corpus, and leveraged against a few hours of routine work by a domain expert. A fully implemented text classification system operating on a medical testbed is described and experimental results based on that testbed are reported.

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