In this paper, a method of automatically classifying Web documents into a set of categories using the fuzzy association concept is proposed. Using the same word or vocabulary to describe different entities creates ambiguity, especially in the Web environment where the user population is large. To solve this problem, fuzzy association is used to capture the relationships among different index terms or keywords in the documents, i.e., each pair of words has an associated value to distinguish itself from the others. Therefore, the ambiguity in word usage is avoided. Experiments using data sets collected from two Web portals: Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) are conducted. We compare our approach to the vector space model with the cosine coefficient. The results show that our approach yields higher accuracy compared to the vector space model.
