Using corpus statistics to remove redundant words in text categorization

This article studies aggressive word removal in text categorization to reduce the noise in free texts and to enhance the computational efficiency of categorization. We use a novel stop word identification method to automatically generate domain specific stoplists which are much larger than a conventional domain‐independent stoplist. In our tests with three categorization methods on text collections from different domains/applications, significant numbers of words were removed without sacrificing categorization effectiveness. In the test of the Expert Network method on CACM documents, for example, an 87% removal of unique words reduced the vocabulary of documents from 8,002 distinct words to 1,045 words, which resulted in a 63% time savings and a 74% memory savings in the computation of category ranking, with a 10% precision improvement on average over not using word removal. It is evident in this study that automated word removal based on corpus statistics has a practical and significant impact on the computational tractability of categorization methods in large databases. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.