Document classification

A document classification problem can be represented in the ARFF format with two attributes per instance, the document text in a “string” attribute and the document class as a nominal attribute. But what can Weka do with a string? Every value – every document’s text – is different from all the others. To accomplish something meaningful, you need to look inside the string. And that’s exactly what the StringToWordVector filter does: it creates an attribute for each word. But – hey! – test documents will contain different words, some of which aren’t in any of the training documents. This conundrum is solved by using the FilteredClassifier, which you’ve already encountered. Cool!