  This paper presents categorization of Croatian texts using Non-Standard Words
(NSW) as features. Non-Standard Words are: numbers, dates, acronyms,
abbreviations, currency, etc. NSWs in Croatian language are determined
according to Croatian NSW taxonomy. For the purpose of this research, 390 text
documents were collected and formed the SKIPEZ collection with 6 classes:
official, literary, informative, popular, educational and scientific. Text
categorization experiment was conducted on three different representations of
the SKIPEZ collection: in the first representation, the frequencies of NSWs are
used as features; in the second representation, the statistic measures of NSWs
(variance, coefficient of variation, standard deviation, etc.) are used as
features; while the third representation combines the first two feature sets.
Naive Bayes, CN2, C4.5, kNN, Classification Trees and Random Forest algorithms
were used in text categorization experiments. The best categorization results
are achieved using the first feature set (NSW frequencies) with the
categorization accuracy of 87%. This suggests that the NSWs should be
considered as features in highly inflectional languages, such as Croatian. NSW
based features reduce the dimensionality of the feature space without standard
lemmatization procedures, and therefore the bag-of-NSWs should be considered
for further Croatian texts categorization experiments.
