METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR TRAINING A TEXT CLASSIFIER

A method and apparatus for training a text classifier is disclosed. A supervised learning system and an annotation system are operated cooperatively to produce a classification vector which can be used to classify documents with respect to a defined class. The annotation system automatically annotates documents with a degree of relevance annotation to produce machine annotated data. The degree of relevance annotation represents the degree to which the document belongs to the defined class. This machine annotated data is used as input to the supervised learning system. In addition to the machine annotated data, the supervised learning system can also receive manually annotated data and/or a user request. The machine annotated data, along with the manually annotated data and/or the user request, are used by the supervised learning system to produce a classification vector. In one embodiment, the supervised learning system comprises a relevance feedback mechanism. The relevance feedback mechanism is operated cooperatively with the annotation system for multiple iterations until a classification vector of acceptable accuracy is produced. The classification vector produced by the invention is the result of a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning.