So, I'm a student, and attend a lecture on text mining. If I implement something useful then I don't have to write exam, and automatically get the best grade. Therefore I want to implement some text mining solutions to enhance FlexWiki, which is an exiting thing and sounds useful anyway. The deadline is 2007. Jan. 24. I'd appreciate any help and/or suggestions.

-- SzaMa - 2006.12.17.

I don't have to write the algorithms from scratch, I can use any source, library. I'm expected to set up 2 useful scenarios.

TextMiningProjectBlog

Scenarios

1. Spam-crap filter

A simple binary categorization: spam/not spam, similar to the e-mail spam filters. The process:

• training
• input: training corpus: many spam and many not spam documents
• generating the input: I'll take the flexwiki.com files. A topic version (.awiki) which is succeeded with a version containing "delete" must be a spam. Others are not; especially if they have many, but not too many versions (playpages have too many versions).
• algorithm: I'll try some well known clustering algorithms, that use "bag of words", maybe somehow take in count the number of references to the page (heuristically: spam has typically 0 or 1 references).
• output: a well trained clustering algorithm
• running the clustering algorithm - 1
• input: every topic on the wiki
• output: a new topic that contains the names of the "potential spam" topics
• running: as scheduled task
• running the clustering algorithm - 2
• running: in the newsletter and rss feed generator
• input: a new or modified topic on the wiki
• output: decision whether it is spam or not, putting it in the feed as a tip, maybe generating a "potential spam" feed.

2. Similar topics - "see also"

AboutSimilarTopics

  SeeAlso: NearestTopic1, NearestTopic2, ... NearestTopicn 

  :Medoid: TheMedoidTopic

  TheMedoidTopic: ClusterMemberTopic1, ClusterMemberTopic2, ... ClusterMemberTopicn

3. Topic tree - "Sitemap"

Building a hierarchical clustering of the topics, and finding names for the clusters.

Output : a topic (maybe a tree of topics) with a full, hierarchical table of contents for the namespace.

Hierarchical clustering

Find some good algorithm form the net.

Finding names

This is easier in FlexWiki than generally in text mining, because the topic name and the summary contain words that strongly describe the content. So generating a cluster's name:

• Get the frequency of the words in the names and summaries for topics in the cluster
• Subtract the frequency of these words in the names and summaries for every topic
• Sort them, the first 1-3 words will give the cluster name.
• Maybe make grammatical analysis: eg. take in the most frequent verb too
• Easy solution: get the most frequent word that ends with "ing", and the most frequent word. I expect results like: "installing FlexWiki"

4. Search engine

A sophisticated search engine with

• inverse index (speed)
• (field based) relevancy calculation that takes topicnames, summaries, keywords, headings into account with greater coefficient
• ranking that takes links into account (pagerank, or something similar)

This is what I don't want to implement, because it would need me to modify the FlexWiki source, and also find a good way to store the indexes...