ABCD: agent based model for document classification

Document classification is the task of analysing, identifying and categorising collection of documents into their annotated classes based on their contents. This paper presents ABCD as an agent-based classifier for documents. ABCD is autonomous by depending on software agents in collecting and distributing documents, and smart by exploiting machine learning techniques to train the underlying classifier. As such, the system consists of two essential components, namely, the agent component and the classification component. To be comprehensive and to facilitate comparative results, five statistical classifiers are exploited. These classifiers are based on Naïve Bayes (NB), Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Repeated Incremental Pruning to Produce Error Reduction (RIPPER), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) algorithms. The proposed model is experimentally tested on both BBC news articles dataset and News Aggregator dataset from artificial intelligence lab. The obtained results indicate the superiority of the Random Forest algorithm for classifying unimodal documents.