A hidden Markov model-based text classification of medical documents

The purpose of the study is to test the application of the hidden Markov model (HMM) using prior knowledge in medical text classification (TC). HMM has been applied to a wide range of applications in information processing, but not so much in TC applications. The Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) is utilized for prior knowledge in the model. A prototype for an HMM-based TC model is designed, and an experimental model based on the prototype is implemented so as to categorize medical documents into MeSH. A subset of OHSUMED is used for the experiments. Our results show that the performance of our model is comparable to those reported in the literature.