In many Web applications, such as blog classification and newsgroup classification, labeled data are in short supply. It often happens that obtaining labeled data in a new domain is expensive and time consuming, while there may be plenty of labeled data in a related but different domain. Traditional text classification approaches are not able to cope well with learning across different domains. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-domain text classification algorithm which extends the traditional probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) algorithm to integrate labeled and unlabeled data, which come from different but related domains, into a unified probabilistic model. We call this new model Topic-bridged PLSA, or TPLSA. By exploiting the common topics between two domains, we transfer knowledge across different domains through a topic-bridge to help the text classification in the target domain. A unique advantage of our method is its ability to maximally mine knowledge that can be transferred between domains, resulting in superior performance when compared to other state-of-the-art text classification approaches. Experimental evaluation on different kinds of datasets shows that our proposed algorithm can improve the performance of cross-domain text classification significantly.
For example, Xue et al. REF have addressed the problem of using the auxiliary labeled data to help classify the unlabeled data in the target domain.
Topic-bridged PLSA for cross-domain text classification
SIGIR '08
Computer Science