Bi-Weighting Domain Adaptation for Cross-Language Text Classification

Abstract

Text classification is widely used in many real-world applications. To obtain satisfied classification performance, most traditional data mining methods require lots of labeled data, which can be costly in terms of both time and human efforts. In reality, there are plenty of such resources in English since it has the largest population in the Internet world, which is not true in many other languages. In this paper, we present a novel transfer learning approach to tackle the cross-language text classification problems. We first align the feature spaces in both domains utilizing some on-line translation service, which makes the two feature spaces under the same coordinate. Although the feature sets in both domains are the same, the distributions of the instances in both domains are different, which violates the i.i.d. assumption in most traditional machine learning methods. For this issue, we propose an iterative feature and instance weighting (Bi-Weighting) method for domain adaptation. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms some baselines including four transfer learning algorithms.