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Due to the increasing amount of information present on the Web, Automatic Document Classification (ADC) has become an important research topic. ADC usually follows a standard supervised learning strategy, where we first build a model using pre-classified documents and then use it to classify new unseen documents. One major challenge for ADC in many scenarios is that the characteristics of the documents and the classes to which they belong may change over time. However, most of the current techniques for ADC are applied without taking into account the temporal evolution of the collection of documents.In this work, we perform a detailed study of the temporal evolution in the ADC, introducing an analysis methodology. We discuss that temporal evolution may be explained by three factors: 1) class distribution; 2) term distribution; and 3) class similarity. We employ metrics and experimental strategies capable of isolating each of these factors in order to analyze them separately, using two very different document collections: the ACM Digital Library and the Medline medical collections. Moreover, we present some preliminary results of potential gains that could be obtained by varying the training set to find the ideal size that minimizes the time effects. We show that by using just 69% of the ACM database, we are able to have an accuracy of 89.76%, and with only 25% of the Medline, an accuracy of 87.57%, which means gains of up to 20% in accuracy with much smaller training sets.

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Automatic document classification can be used to organize documents in a digital library, construct on-line directories, improve the precision of web searching, or help the interactions between user and search engines. In this paper we explore how linkage information inherent to different document collections can be used to enhance the effectiveness of classification algorithms. We have experimented with three link-based bibliometric measures, co-citation, bibliographic coupling and Amsler, on three different document collections: a digital library of computer science papers, a web directory and an on-line encyclopedia. Results show that both hyperlink and citation information can be used to learn reliable and effective classifiers based on a kNN classifier. In one of the test collections used, we obtained improvements of up to 69.8% of macro-averaged F 1 over the traditional text-based kNN classifier, considered as the baseline measure in our experiments. We also present alternative ways of combining bibliometric based classifiers with text based classifiers. Finally, we conducted studies to analyze the situation in which the bibliometric-based classifiers failed and show that in such cases it is hard to reach consensus regarding the correct classes, even for human judges.