  For many text classification tasks, there is a major problem posed by the
lack of labeled data in a target domain. Although classifiers for a target
domain can be trained on labeled text data from a related source domain, the
accuracy of such classifiers is usually lower in the cross-domain setting.
Recently, string kernels have obtained state-of-the-art results in various text
classification tasks such as native language identification or automatic essay
scoring. Moreover, classifiers based on string kernels have been found to be
robust to the distribution gap between different domains. In this paper, we
formally describe an algorithm composed of two simple yet effective
transductive learning approaches to further improve the results of string
kernels in cross-domain settings. By adapting string kernels to the test set
without using the ground-truth test labels, we report significantly better
accuracy rates in cross-domain English polarity classification.
