N-Grams and Morphological Normalization in Text Classification: A Comparison on a Croatian-English Parallel Corpus

In this paper we compare n-grams and morphological normalization, two inherently different text-preprocessing methods, used for text classification on a Croatian-English parallel corpus. Our approach to comparing different text preprocessing techniques is based on measuring computational performance (execution time and memory consumption), as well as classification performance. We show that although n-grams achieve classifier performance comparable to traditional word-based feature extraction and can act as a substitute for morphological normalization, they are computationally much more demanding.