A language-based approach to categorical analysis
Name
49676138-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
9.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
86fc7a050f6ee4abf7154b7c796088fa
Author(s)
Marlow, Cameron Alexander, 1977-
Advisor(s)
Walter Bender.
Date Issued
2001
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
With the digitization of media, computers can be employed to help us with the process of classification, both by learning from our behavior to perform the task for us and by exposing new ways for us to think about our information. Given that most of our media comes in the form of electronic text, research in this area focuses on building automatic text classification systems. The standard representation employed by these systems, known as the bag-of-words approach to information retrieval, represents documents as collections of words. As a byproduct of this model, automatic classifiers have difficulty distinguishing between different meanings of a single word. This research presents a new computational model of electronic text, called a synchronic imprint, which uses structural information to contextualize the meaning of words. Every concept in the body of a text is described by its relationships with other concepts in the same text, allowing classification systems to distinguish between alternative meanings of the same word. This representation is applied to both the standard problem of text classification and also to the task of enabling people to better identify large bodies of text. The latter is achieved through the development of a visualization tool named flux that models synchronic imprints as a spring network.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 2001.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-81).
Subjects
Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
