Exploring The Impact of Stemming on Text Topic-Based Classification Accuracy

Abstract

Text classification attempts to assign written texts to specific group types that share the same linguistic features. One class of features that have been widely employed for a wide range of classification tasks is lexical features. This study explores the impact of stemming on text classification using lexical features. To explore, this study is based on a corpus of thirty texts written by six authors with topics that focus on politics, history, science, prose, sport, and food. These texts are stemmed using a light stemming algorithm. In order to classify these texts according to the topic by means of lexical features, linear hierarchical clustering and non-linear clustering (SOM) is carried out on the stemmed and unstemmed texts. Although both clustering methods are able to classify texts by topic with two models produce accurate and stable results, the results suggest that the impact of a light stemming on the accuracy of text classification by topic is ineffectual. The accuracy is neither increased nor decreased on the stemmed texts, whereby the stemming algorithm helped reducing the dimensionality of feature vector space model.