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Keywords, k-NN and Neural Networks: a Support for Hierarchical Categorization of Texts in Brazilian Portuguese

A frequent problem in automatic categorization applications involving Portuguese language is the absence of large corpora of previously classified documents, which permit the validation of experiments carried out. Generally, the available corpora are not classified or, when they are, they contain a very reduced number of documents. The general goal of this study is to contribute to the development of applications which aim at text categorization for Brazilian Portuguese. Specifically, we point out that keywords selection associated with neural networks can improve results in the categorization of Brazilian Portuguese texts. The corpus is composed of 30 thousand texts from the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, organized in 29 sections. In the process of categorization, the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm and the Multilayer Perceptron neural networks trained with the backpropagation algorithm are used. It is also part of our study to test the identification of keywords parting from the log-likelihood statistical measure and to use them as features in the categorization process. The results clearly show that the precision is better when using neural networks than when using the k-NN.