In Oracle database 12c Release 2, Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) was introduced as an unsupervised algorithm used by Oracle Data Mining for Feature Extraction. Starting from Oracle Database 18c, ESA is enhanced as a supervised algorithm for Classification.

As a Feature Extraction algorithm, ESA does not discover latent features but instead uses explicit features represented in an existing knowledge base. As a Feature Extraction algorithm, ESA is mainly used for calculating semantic similarity of text documents and for explicit topic modeling. As a Classification algorithm, ESA is primarily used for categorizing text documents. Both the Feature Extraction and Classification versions of ESA can be applied to numeric and categorical input data as well.

The input to ESA is a set of attributes vectors. Every attribute vector is associated with a concept. The concept is a feature in the case of Feature Extraction or a target class in the case of Classification. For Feature Extraction, only one attribute vector may be associated with any feature. For Classification, the training set may contain multiple attribute vectors associated with any given target class. These rows related to one target class are aggregated into one by the ESA algorithm.

The output of ESA is a sparse attribute-concept matrix that contains the most important attribute-concept associations. The strength of the association is captured by the weight value of each attribute-concept pair. The attribute-concept matrix is stored as a reverse index that lists the most important concepts for each attribute.

The scope of Classification tasks that ESA handles is different than the Classification algorithms such as Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines. ESA can perform large scale Classification with the number of distinct classes up to hundreds of thousands. The large scale classification requires gigantic training data sets with some classes having significant number of training samples whereas others are sparsely represented in the training data set.

Learn how Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) can be used for Text mining.

Explicit knowledge often exists in text form. Multiple knowledge bases are available as collections of text documents. These knowledge bases can be generic, for example, Wikipedia, or domain-specific. Data preparation transforms the text into vectors that capture attribute-concept associations. ESA is able to quantify semantic relatedness of documents even if they do not have any words in common. The function FEATURE_COMPARE can be used to compute semantic relatedness.

Automatic Data Preparation normalizes input vectors to a unit length for Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA).

When there are missing values in columns with simple data types (not nested), ESA replaces missing categorical values with the mode and missing numerical values with the mean. When there are missing values in nested columns, ESA interprets them as sparse. The algorithm replaces sparse numeric data with zeros and sparse categorical data with zero vectors. The Oracle Data Mining data preparation transforms the input text into a vector of real numbers. These numbers represent the importance of the respective words in the text.

Discusses the terms associated with Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA).

Multi-target Classification

The training items in these large scale classifications belong to several classes. The goal of classification in such case is to detect possible multiple target classes for one item. This kind of classification is called multi-target classification. The target column for ESA-based classification is extended. Collections are allowed as target column values. The collection type for the target in ESA-based classification is ORA_MINING_VARCHAR2_NT.

Large-scale classification

Large-scale classification applies to ontologies that contain gigantic numbers of categories, usually ranging in tens or hundreds of thousands. This large-scale classification also requires gigantic training datasets which are usually unbalanced, that is, some classes may have significant number of training samples whereas others may be sparsely represented in the training dataset. Large-scale classification normally results in multiple target class assignments for a given test case.

Topic modeling

Topic modelling refers to derivation of the most important topics of a document. Topic modeling can be explicit or latent. Explicit topic modeling results in the selection of the most relevant topics from a pre-defined set, for a given document. Explicit topics have names and can be verbalized. Latent topic modeling identifies a set of latent topics characteristic for a collection of documents. A subset of these latent topics is associated with every document under examination. Latent topics do not have verbal descriptions or meaningful interpretation.