Abstract

This study applied automatic classification using table of contents (TOC) text for 6,253 social science books from a newly arrived list collected by a university library. The k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm was used as a classifier, and the ten divisions on the second level of the DDC’s main class 300 given to books by the library were used as classes (labels). The features used in this study were keywords extracted from titles and TOCs of the books. The TOCs were obtained through the OpenAPI from an Internet bookstore. As a result, it was found that the TOC features were good for improving both classification recall and precision. The TOC was shown to reduce the overfitting problem of imbalanced data with its rich features. Law and education have high topic specificity in the field of social sciences, so the only title features can bring good classification performance in these fields.