Naive Bayesian Text Classification

Paul Graham popularized the term "Bayesian Classification" (or more accurately "Naïve Bayesian Classification") after his "A Plan for Spam" article was published (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html). In fact, text classifiers based on naïve Bayesian and other techniques have been around for many years. Companies such as Autonomy and Interwoven incorporate machine-learning techniques to automatically classify documents of all kinds; one such machine-learning technique is naïve Bayesian text classification. Naïve Bayesian text classifiers are fast, accurate, simple, and easy to implement. In this article, I present a complete naïve Bayesian text classifier written in 100 lines of commented, nonobfuscated Perl.