A feature selection approach for automatic e-book classification based on discourse segmentation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel feature selection approach for automatic text classification of large digital documents – e-books of online library system. The main idea mainly aims on automatically identifying the discourse features in order to improving the feature selection process rather than focussing on the size of the corpus. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed framework intends to automatically identify the discourse segments within e-books and capture proper discourse subtopics that are cohesively expressed in discourse segments and treating these subtopics as informative and prominent features. The selected set of features is then used to train and perform the e-book classification task based on the support vector machine technique. Findings – The evaluation of the proposed framework shows that identifying discourse segments and capturing subtopic features leads to better performance, in comparison with two conventional feature selection techniques: TFIDF and mut...