“A Comparison of Event Models for Naive Bayes Text Classification”, by Andrew McCallum and Kamal Nigam. In AAAI/ICML-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization, pp. 41-48. Technical Report WS-98-05. AAAI Press. 1998. PDF.
(optional) “Naive Bayes Text Classification: A Statistical Natural Language Processing Project”, by Chris Monson Chris_Monson.pdf.
Week 2: Semi-Supervised Learning with Naive Bayes and Expectation Maximization
“Learning to Classify Text from Labeled and Unlabeled Documents”, by Kamal Nigam, Andrew McCallum, Sebastian Thrun and Tom Mitchell. PDF (8 pages)
(optional) “Text Classification from Labeled and Unlabeled Documents using EM”, by Kamal Nigam, Andrew McCallum, Sebastian Thrun and Tom Mitchell. Machine Learning, 39(2/3). pp. 103-134. 2000. PDF (34 pages)
Week 3: Text Classification with Maximum Entropy
“Using Maximum Entropy for Text Classification”, by Kamal Nigam, John Lafferty, Andrew McCallum. PDF (7 pages)
(optional) “A Maximum Entropy Approach to Natural Language Processing”, by Adam Berger, Vincent Della Pietra, Stephen Della Pietra. PDF (34 pages)
Week 4: Feature Selection
Mutual information and Log-Likelihood ratio sections in Manning & Schuetze: 5.1-5.4
(optional) “A comparative study on feature selection for text categorization”, by Yiming Yang and Jan Pedersen. PDF
Week 5: Feature Selection in the Learning Loop
Focus on the section 4 about feature selection in the learning loop: “A Maximum Entropy Approach to Natural Language Processing”, by Adam Berger, Vincent Della Pietra, Stephen Della Pietra. PDF
Week 6: Feature Selection as Word Clustering
“Distributional Clustering of Words for Text Classification”, by Douglas Baker and Andrew McCallum. PDF
Week 7: Text Classification with Support Vector Machines
Work through as much of the SVM Tutorial by Nello Cristianini as you can. I don't expect you to get all the way through this. Presentation slides from ICML 2001 Tutorial: PDF
“Text Categorization with Support Vector Machines: Learning with Many Relevant Features”, by Thorsten Joachims. PDF
Moving on to text clustering …
Weeks 8 & 9: Clustering with Naive Bayes
“An Experimental Comparison of Several Clustering and Initialization Methods”, by Marina Meila and David Heckerman. Try to fight through the whole thing. PS