Document classification through interactive supervision of document and term labels

Effective incorporation of human expertise, while exerting a low cognitive load, is a critical aspect of real-life text classification applications that is not adequately addressed by batch-supervised high-accuracy learners. Standard text classifiers are supervised in only one way: assigning labels to whole documents. They are thus deprived of the enormous wisdom that humans carry about the significance of words and phrases in context. We present HIClass, an interactive and exploratory labeling package that actively collects user opinion on feature representations and choices, as well as whole-document labels, while minimizing redundancy in the input sought. Preliminary experience suggests that, starting with essentially an unlabeled corpus, very little cognitive labor suffices to set up a labeled collection on which standard classifiers perform well.