Contrastive approach towards text source classification based on top-bag-of-word similarity

This paper proposes a method to automatically classify texts from different varieties of the same language. We show that similarity measure is a robust tool for studying comparable corpora of language variations. We take LDC's Chinese Gigaword Corpus composed of three varieties of Chinese from Mainland China, Singapore, and Taiwan, as the comparable corpora. Top-bag-of-word similarity measures reflect distances among the three varieties of the same language. A Top-bag-of-word similarity based contrastive approach was taken to solve the text source classification problem. Our results show that a contrastive approach using similarity to rule out identity of source and to arrive actual source by inference is more robust that directly confirmation of source by similarity. We show that this approach is robust when applied to other texts.