The ineffectiveness of within-document term frequency in text classification

For the purposes of classification it is common to represent a document as a bag of words. Such a representation consists of the individual terms making up the document together with the number of times each term appears in the document. All classification methods make use of the terms. It is common to also make use of the local term frequencies at the price of some added complication in the model. Examples are the naïve Bayes multinomial model (MM), the Dirichlet compound multinomial model (DCM) and the exponential-family approximation of the DCM (EDCM), as well as support vector machines (SVM). Although it is usually claimed that incorporating local word frequency in a document improves text classification performance, we here test whether such claims are true or not. In this paper we show experimentally that simplified forms of the MM, EDCM, and SVM models which ignore the frequency of each word in a document perform about at the same level as MM, DCM, EDCM and SVM models which incorporate local term frequency. We also present a new form of the naïve Bayes multivariate Bernoulli model (MBM) which is able to make use of local term frequency and show again that it offers no significant advantage over the plain MBM. We conclude that word burstiness is so strong that additional occurrences of a word essentially add no useful information to a classifier.