Automatic Semantic Categorization of News Headlines using Ensemble Machine Learning: A Comparative Study

Due to widespread availability of Internet there are a huge of sources that produce massive amounts of daily news. Moreover, the need for information by users has been increasing unprecedently, so it is critical that the news is automatically classified to permit users to access the required news instantly and effectively. One of the major problems with online news sets is the categorization of the vast number news and articles. In order to solve this problem, the machine learning model along with the Natural Language Processing (NLP) is widely used for automatic news classification to categorize topics of untracked news and individual opinion based on the user’s prior interests. However, the existing studies mostly rely on NLP but uses huge documents to train the prediction model, thus it is hard to classify a short text without using semantics. Few studies focus on exploring classifying the news headlines using the semantics. Therefore, this paper attempts to use semantics and ensemble learning to improve the short text classification. The proposed methodology starts with preprocessing stage then applying feature engineering using word2vec with TF-IDF vectorizer. Afterwards, the classification model was developed with different classifier KNN, SVM, Naïve Bayes and Gradient boosting. The experimental results verify that Multinomial Naïve Bayes shows the best performance with an accuracy of 90.12% and recall 90%.

@article{Bogery2019,
  title     = {Automatic Semantic Categorization of News Headlines using Ensemble Machine Learning: A Comparative Study},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {10},
  number    = {11},
  year      = {2019},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Raghad Bogery and Nora Al Babtain and Nida Aslam and Nada Alkabour and Yara Al Hashim and Irfan Ullah Khan},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0101190},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0101190}
}